January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Maya Khosla was raised in India, England, Algeria, Burma, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. Those cultures as well as her background in biology strongly shaped her writing. As an independent wildlife biologist, Maya is comfortable wandering through oak woodlands or waist-deep in silty waters (wearing chest waders). Her books include “Keel Bone,” (poetry from Bear Star Press; 2003 Dorothy Brunsman Award), “Web of Water: Life in Redwood Creek,” (nonfiction from Golden Gate National Park Conservancy Press, 1997) and “Heart of the Tearing,” (poetry from Red Dust Press 1995). Performing, teaching and writing have earned her awards from the Headlands Center for the Arts, Poets and Writers Inc., and the Ludvig Vogelstein Foundation.
Red-Tailed Hawk
The flowers you give
are my maps. If I am ever lost
their petals’ scent will pull me
toward your musk again.
January 1, 2008
It’s a cloud-lidded morning. Thoroughly soaked, the fenceposts lining my little backyard are stained so dark the lichen growing on them looks fluorescent green by comparison. Rain is a mark of auspicious beginnings, though Michael just walked out of my condo with his spare motorcycle helmet and running clothes.
“I’m moving to the Philippines, Tash,” he declared before leaving. “It’s home.”
He has often mused about emigrating. But the emphasis on home gave his announcement a ring of conviction I haven’t heard before. We were standing in my condo hallway next to the stairs going up to my bedroom, where we shared New Years resolutions last night. I searched the olive-green flecks mixed into the browns of his pupils that drew me in from the moment of our first date, years ago, when he lifted me into the air in spite of a sore left shoulder.
But this morning his eyes were too dark to see the greens. He sank to the edge of my second stair to tie his shoelaces.
Michael was raised in the Philippines. His Dominican mother, siblings and the online game company he works for are all based there. I’ve visited Manila, Kanlubang, and Makiling with him. I too have most of my family overseas, in India. So I sympathize with his sense of home in a distant country of seven thousand-plus islands. It’s the warmth, the ability to buy a single cigarette, to figure out ways to return home from office for an afternoon nap. It’s the tropical air that can get so heated and heavy with moisture that when it breaks into drizzle, it’s hard to notice the difference.
He stood again, filling my condo hallway.
“Give me a hug? I won’t be seeing you again.” He leaned forward, arms reaching, the fingers of his square hands spread. His lips were in a pout, his eyes focused, intent.
I shook my head. As if yielding meant he would leave my place, California, the country. As if leaving without that hug meant he would have to reconsider.
When he turned to fumble with the front door locks and pick up the helmet, his right hand came within inches of me. I felt an urge to grab and shake it vigorously. He slipped out and I held the door open, breathing in the scent of post-drizzle moisture.
Sun behind veils, salts of loss on the tongue. An Anna’s hummingbird dashed past in a streak of shiny vermilion, wings beating about eighty times a minute, like a pulse racing over words held down. Its speed emphasized its ground level opposite, a two-legged trapped as if in torpor, unable to rush out and beckon her partner back.
It’s quiet here; guilt deadbolts me in. I made him leave. My hallway looks whole shades dingier. The dining table and its contents, two freshly drained tea mugs, a persimmon and a sliver of leftover fruit loaf, shrink-wrapped in plastic, hold the weight of a recent conclusion. Upstairs, my unmade bed is too tousled to allow for a quick smoothing over. It needs to be stripped and redone.
The blooms he brought me yesterday are louder in his absence—red so saturated it looks wet. They are a reminder. We had planned a morning hike. The remainder of today was supposed to form neatly around the crystal of its there-and-back symmetry, the sweet scents and rush of blood and breath.
Last week’s storms have filled the North Bay’s soils and streams and enriched its forests and meadows with every color except this drained gray of sky. I have spent twelve winters here working out in the wild, so I know. Coho salmon are torpedoing up towards their deaths against the flow of swollen creeks. Frogs are emitting creaky calls from under umbrellas of dripping ferns. Bulb-bright highlights of new growth are re-greening every limb-tip of every bishop pine, redwood and fir. When a hawk alights, the branch gripped in its circlets of claws will shake and sway and splash. Winter wrens and varied thrushes in the vicinity will fall silent.
I haven’t the energy to emerge.
Michael is driving south to his home in Novato. Inside his car, he will switch the air vent back to ‘cold’ since I’m not with him. He will brush his hair impatiently with his left hand, the dark curls springing back after each stroke as if in protest. His eyes will be locked ahead as he waits for a chance to enter the right lane, glide past the slower car and swing back across highway dots and dashes.
The New Years resolutions we bantered about seem utterly irrelevant. Mine included accomplishing symbolic nuggets of what I hope to achieve within the next three hundred and sixty four days. “First thing’s first: begin it feeling new,” my mother used to launch forth. “Wear pressed clothes without a trace of past perfumes. Take six deep breaths at an open window. Make modest wishes…”
I do. Today they were good food and exercise, fresh air and water, a respectable chunk of work and a search for bobcats, raptors and frogs. These were the seeds I wanted to set, the emblems of my intentions for 2109.
Moving to the window, I twist the angle of the faux bamboo blinds and put my face close. A cold smell is all. A few weeks ago Michael gripped my battery-powered drill in both hands and worked on each fitting with single-minded diligence, asking me to hand him a nail here, a bracket or a blind there, stepping back to view it before moving on to the next one. Hours later he had installed them in all my windows. We whispered our verdict in unison.
“Wow!”
He drew down the new blind, placed my drill inside its blue box on the coffee table and closed the distance between us. When we kissed, a slight leak in his right nostril wet my upper lip. I moved to wipe myself and he drew back to clean his nose with a quick apology. He was just as quick to advance again. The thudding in my ears blended with the salts and frictions of touch and the nose-drip was forgotten — until we parted to climb the stairs and the same wet spot chilled with evaporation.
When I get the angle correct, cloud-light glances off the blinds’ buttery hue and lights up the red and yellow cushions scattered across two futons that frame one corner of my living room. On the shelf in my downstairs closet is the new brocade sweatshirt I planned to throw on before leaving. Next to it a blank space where Michael’s white motorcycle helmet was stored. The sight propels me upstairs. On the top shelf of my bedroom closet, his running tea shirt and shorts were kept folded next to my field shirts that have clung to their mud-and algae-stains through wash cycles. He’s neater than I am. He’s meticulous. Even the absence of clothes looks rectangular.
I can’t bring myself to move my shirts and woolen shawls over to fill the empty space. Leaving it empty falls in the same category as refusing him the goodbye-hug. It’s a safeguard that could protect against an absence so complete it’s irreversible. Against losing my grip on those arms that looked weighty with rest just hours ago in this room.
The dishes, counters, and tabletop are clean, the bed made. I pressed the persimmon from its ends so the flesh gave, easily, two halves of a whole. The orange flesh had the consistency of an overripe mango but was sweeter, chalkier, full of rich sugars and salts. It was comfort food.
I threw away the fruit loaf that began our quarrel. I had taken it out of the freezer and warmed it in lieu of my homemade date-oatmeal bars, which I had run out of.
Michael eyed the density of fruit and nut between bites.
“Who’s been here? You had a whole loaf a couple of days ago.”
“This? It’s been sitting in the freezer,” I argued.
Still chewing, he scanned my living room and shook his head.
“I don’t think so. Look at those two cushions lying by the fireplace. You’ve had company. Recently.”
I tried to remember when my friends Susan, Mella, and Sally had been over, whether they’d eaten much of the loaf. We had met sometime before Christmas, probably two weeks ago. Then I realized it didn’t matter what I said.
Michael was chuckling, shaking his head. “Tash, it’s obvious someone’s been here. Cozy evening with him?”
“You know what, Michael? Enough.”
He stared at his empty tea mug as though making a calculation. Then he sprang up. “You know what? It’s obvious you’re involved with someone. I’ll do the same.”
“I think you need to leave,” I heard myself say. He responded with the wide-eyed gaze of a frightened child. Then he went around the corner and I listened to the thump-thump of his feet up the stairs.
It’s 1:44 p.m. When I get online, Michael is there too.
“I am completely devasted and cant even breath,” he begins his chat.
He’s back. Except the misspellings reveal a carelessness rare for him.
He types, “I just can’t imagine being without the love of my life and yet I bring us so much pain and turmoil.”
It’s a shot of lucid light searing the gloom. Perhaps we’ll get through this. He writes that even his divorce was easier than losing me.
“You are not losing me!” I reply.
“It’s this seroquel,” he writes. “It’s making me crazy.” Seroquel is his latest antidepressant.
Two hundred and ten emoticons of a face in tears arrive on my screen. I have never understood how he does that so fast. I want to reach through the electronic windows separating us and cover the hands that type unfiltered fears and push the return button with the urgency of one who is trying to check his fall in a dream.
He does not mention the fruit loaf or cushions.
It’s a little over a mile to the cement-lined ponds and greens of Sonoma State University. I’ve worn my new sweatshirt for ritual’s sake, and a rain jacket over it. There are footprints ahead, but no one else is walking the Copeland Creek Trail now. No one is playing in the football field south of my path. The creek is invisible behind a riparian world that has risen like fire; swaths of green and nubs of new leaves-to-be are pointing skyward like a multitude of hopes. Their savings account, groundwater, is rich and gurgles underground like a secret.
There is a slap and suck to each step through muddy softness. Crossing a puddle the brown of soil-flour, I think of the hike we missed this morning. The same eight miles through Point Reyes National Seashore along Bear Valley Creek became a habit for us long before Michael’s counselor began giving him prescriptions for antidepressants. We stuck with the eight: Bear Valley Trail to Meadow, Meadow to Sky, Sky to Mt. Whittenberg and back down to Bear Valley. Is there some significance to our missing out on the first of the year? Was it best, asking him to leave when I did?
A white-crowned sparrow clings to a spindle-thin twig among a perfusion of bare branches. Its gold beak is an ember opening to release a series of plaintive trills. I watch with binoculars. It catches sight of me and dips into the creek-side tangle.
A red-tailed hawk circles on the air thermals above. Its tail swivels and I catch a glimpse the red dorsal feathers. My binoculars magnify the down-turned head, shifting slightly from side to side as it scans the football field. Hunting is a swift dream, mired in instinct but crisp with the single-minded focus of pursuit.
In a breath, it bunches up its wings, extends its claws and plunges fieldward. A predator’s drive looks so sure, yet it is in the dark about itself. The wings unfurl as claws touch grass. Now it’s hopping, now still. Apparently it has missed its target.
A few seasons ago I encountered a fallen red-tail. That too was a cloud-wrapped day. I was surveying for burrowing owls in rolling grasslands close to Altamont Pass, where wind turbines cover the ridge-tops for miles. The raptor must have collided with the turbine roaring above us.
“If you throw a large cloth over it,” a woman at the nearest wildlife rehabilitation center explained when I called, “it will calm down. If you don’t have one, back off or you’ll risk having your wrists lacerated.”
I shed my fleece jacket and spread it wide, measuring. It was no large cloth. I made a split-second decision and advanced in terror. The bird stood regal, head rising, hooked beak bared, crest feathers standing. They looked damp—rain or sweat? Every inch of its foot and a half tall body was designed to intimidate.
Still, I advanced closer. It took one hop away. The left wing was dragging in a pathetic antithesis of the poise that was using up so much of its body’s meager energy savings. It raised the talons of one leg at me with a predator’s regal fury. The beak was still bared. I couldn’t afford to hesitate. Let instant darkness calm it.
I had been given good rules over the phone; I had sat through training classes in Golden Gate Raptor Observatory before that. But when the moment closed in, adrenalin-fired fear eclipsed all thought.
I dropped my fleece on the bird and all was very quiet. I bent double and gathered up the raptor in my jacket. It had calmed down— immediately. It sat still, trapped, light as held breath.
Walking uphill with arms outstretched, I was panting soon. My car was parked under the wind turbine and its wails grew and grew as I neared the ridgeline. Inside my jacket, all was so still that there were moments when I was convinced the red-tail had slipped out. I turned back once, but the capture spot was already out of view.
Was it comfortable inside? Would it heal, hover in the updrafts again to decipher—the way no human eye can—the day-glow ultraviolet ribbons of mouse urine, the twitching, racing maneuvers that must look utterly futile from a bird’s eye view?
And most important, had I folded the broken wing correctly, given it enough breathing room?
I didn’t dare check. Awareness of a human face would have caused more stress to the bird. The questions were torture, though. They haven’t left me, though I now know one of the answers.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sushma Joshi is a Nepali writer and filmmaker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. End of the World, her book of short stories, was long-listed for the Frank O’ Connor International Short Story Award in 2009. She co-edited New Nepal, New Voices (Rupa 2008). Art Matters, a book of art essays, was supported by the Alliance Francaise De Katmandou. Inspired by Nepali history and contemporary politics, her fiction and reportage deal with issues of social inequality, environment and gender. Sound of Silence (1997) her first documentary, was screened at the New Asian Currents at the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival. Water (2000) was screened on the Q and A with Riz Khan on CNN International, and the UN World Water Forum in Kyoto. The Escape (2006), a short about a teacher targeted by rebels, was accepted to the Berlinale Talent Campus. Joshi was born and grew up in Kathmandu. She studied in Dowhill School, Kurseong, for four years before finishing her education in Mahendra Bhawan and Siddhartha Vanasthali Institute. She received a BA in international relations from Brown University in 1996. She has a MA in anthropology from the New School, NY, and a MA in English Literature from Middlebury College, Vermont.Joshi contributes The Global and the Local, a weekly op-ed, to Nepal’s leading English daily, The Kathmandu Post.
Shelling Peas and History Lessons
“And then? And then?” Sapana asked, six-year-old impatience catching up with the slow pace of thought of an old woman.
“Yes, yes,” said the old woman absently, caught up in a world that was a long time away from this hot, dusty May afternoon. A long time ago, when the mist covered the early mornings, and the ice froze on top of wells. Long ago, when she was still young enough to clamber barefoot on the winding, stony paths of the hills. Young enough to drink the icy water of the springs and let it wash away the pain in her legs. Young enough to nibble the chutro berries from the branches like the goats, and then sit down with a sharp splinter to take out the thorns embedded in the soles of her feet.
Bubu moved easily between these two worlds. This hot afternoon, with the sun baking the tiles of the verandah as she sat in the shade with the six-year-old in her yellow frock, shelling peas together to the distant roar of the traffic. And that other world of brown dust between the toes, the water that sprung out of the hills like a blessing, the echoes of people calling from one valley to the other.
“It was a long time ago. Sixty, sixty-five years ago? Maybe more. I was small then, about eight maybe. Just a little older than you are now. All the little ones would be sent into the hills every morning to search for firewood.”
Sapana dragged a straw mat down from the wall so she could sit comfortably on the scorching tiles. She was the only one at home. Buba and Ama were in the office, and so were all her uncles and aunts. They would get home only in the evening. Her school ended at three pm, unlike all her cousins, who got off at five. Sapana, left alone in an empty house, had finally wandered up to the roof, where Bubu was engaged in endless chores. Bubu, who usually did not say a whole lot, sometimes could be egged on to reveal a parable or ukkan-tukki that Sapana had never heard before. The old woman, with a turban of faded red cloth wrapped around her head, continued to shell the peas. The two green halves exploded under her calloused fingers, pop-pop, like corn popping open in heat.
“The jungles were still very thick then, not like today, where you have to walk for half a day if you want to find a tree,” said Bubu, stretching out her long legs in front of her. She was tall, taller than some of the men in the house. A faded choli was tied around her thin chest. Sapana could occasionally catch a glimpse of a withered breast through the gap in the middle of her blouse, which didn’t close. “I don’t know how the people will manage when those start running out. Anyway, we wouldn’t have to go very far those days. We would fill our patuka with popped corn, and eat that when the sun got hot in the sky.”
“Just popcorn? Nothing else?” asked Sapana. She popped a pea and felt the tender juice spurt out in her mouth. The softness of the green halves turned to pulp between her teeth. She stuck her tongue out to see the squelchy remains.
“When we went to get the firewood, we would take the goats with us to graze, and some of the younger children would drink straight out of the teats. I never did that though. Disgusting habit,” said Bubu, wrinkling her patrician nose. Bubu noticed the empty pea-shells wilting in the heat, and pushed them under the shadow cast by the huge bottlebrush tree. The red brushes hung down in drunken lethargy, filled with the sweet honey hum of a thousand bees.
“Then there were the berries and amla that grew in the forest. The forest floor would be covered with them, we would not even have to climb the trees. Sometimes, if it was the season, we would put some soybeans and peanuts into our patuka too. Ah, those were delicious. You have to roast them over the hadi pot to get the flavor out. Now I don’t even have the teeth to bite them…”
“But you always grind them up and put them in your tea,” said Sapana, pulling out the ragged edges of the straw mat. She now had a long straw in her hand, and she was carefully weaving the two ends into little Os to make a pair of spectacle frames.
“That’s right, Baba. I shouldn’t complain. I have all my cares taken care of.”
There was a long silence as the woman drifted off into another reverie. Her hands moved swiftly, automatically, her mind elsewhere. Sapana’s fingers slipped and slid over the pods, unable to pop them open like her Bubu was doing so effortlessly. She wondered when she would be able to shell like the old woman, when she would be able to pick them up and pop them open with speed and efficiency without mangling anything. When she would not have to rip them open with her teeth, and she could have an entire bowl of round peas without tooth-marks in them. All of the peas she had managed to extract in various stages of wholeness had either rolled into the grass or ended up discreetly in her own appreciative mouth.
She was more a hindrance than help, and she knew it. She also knew that Bubu’s patience was limited. In a short while, she would start getting irritated by either the flow of questions, or the wasteful shelling, and that would be the end of Sapana’s daily dose of both stories and peas. Sapana, with six-year-old wisdom, knew that she had to be judicious in order not to cut off the flow to either of these precious things. So the peas were popped into the mouth with uncanny timing each time Bubu looked away, and the solicitations only piped in when it looked like the old woman was too lost in her own thoughts to notice the prompting.
Bubu tolerated Sapana’s presence, her inquisitiveness, more than she tolerated many other things. The child was her little baba, her darling. She was not a demonstrative woman, and she had strict rules of impartiality towards her nine charges. But there was something about Sapana, who was the smallest and followed her around mercilessly, begging for lumps of sugar and stories with equal insistence, that made her special among all the children she had nursed. Perhaps she was still too innocent, and didn’t yet realize the rules of the world. Perhaps she would grow up to become a cold-hearted woman who would forget old Bubu, like all the other children before her had done.
Nobody even bothered to talk to her nowadays. She was just there, the servant who had been around for so long that people took her for granted, like the giant empty grain-jars in the basement. But Sapana still ran to her with her questions.
“How do you know a spider’s web brings wealth to a home?
“Why can’t Ama touch the loukat tree when she is bleeding?”
“Why is Mami being nasty to Sanuama?“
“Because a spider is lucky.”
“Because when a woman is bleeding she makes the crops die.”
“Because Mami thinks Sanuama is not doing enough work, and that she should stay at home instead of going to college.”
And then the answers, which were not really answers, would elicit more questions: Why is a spider lucky? How can a bleeding woman make the crops die? And why shouldn’t Sanuama go to college if her brothers can? The questions were never-ending, an answer promptly giving birth to the next inquiry, in an unending web of interrogation.
Bubu looked forwards to the times when the little girl would come running up, asking her slyly if she could help with shelling the peas, emptying herself of all of her questions in her head, and demanding to know the old woman’s too. The old woman hadn’t talked about her life for sixty-five years. Perhaps she had mentioned her brother to the woman who came to sell turmeric. It was difficult for her to talk about her life. Nobody had ever bothered to ask her, and she would not have told them anything even if they had asked. Indeed, why should they? But Sapana needed to know.
“What about the tigers? You said there were tigers in the jungle. Weren’t you scared they were going to carry you away?”
The old woman laughed, the laugh instantly turning to a hoarse cough. “The tigers never came near us. We would see them only from a distance; they were as scared of us as we were of them. I know of only one person who was attacked by a tiger, and that was by accident. He was walking at night alone, the idiot. You should never walk alone in the jungle at night, you never know what might happen.”
Sapana held her breath. It was one of those rare moments when the old woman’s mind rambled into exciting territory. She hoped Bubu would not lose her train of thought. Often times, Bubu would decide to stop the story randomly in the middle. Once in a while, she followed her stories to the end.
“He came too near to the cubs. The mother flew at him, and who can blame her. One has to protect one’s children, especially when their father is not around…”
“Did you have any children, Bubu?” asked Sapana.
There was silence. The traffic continued its muted roar in the distance. The koel bird went coo-hoo. Sapana felt a shock of fear at having breached an unknown taboo. Bubu had never talked about her children before.
“Did you?” Her voice muted was with fright, but she pressed on, because she was six and at six one knows only that one has to know, even when it is forbidden to know.
“Uuhuh. Long time ago. I had a son,” said Bubu. Her voice, rough as sandpaper, sounded almost soft.
“Where’s he now? Is he as big as me?” Sapana asked.
Bubu looked at the small figure sitting on the mat, straw frames perched on her nose. “He’s gone,” she replied gruffly. What would her son have looked like at the same age, she wondered.
“Oh.” Sapana felt a rush of pure shame, mixed with guilt. But death was a topic too close to her heart for her to stop wondering. The shame was overshadowed by the desire that had arisen to understand this sudden opening up of the secrets of Bubu’s life. Why had she never told Sapana that she had had a baby? Why had she kept it a secret? She knew it had to do with death, which was shadowy and smelt of old people and brought tears, hushed telephone conversations, and the puzzling disappearance of adults. Her father had not returned home when his great-uncle had died. He had re-appeared, with a shaved head, dressed all in white cotton, down to his tennis shoes, thirteen days later. Old people died all the time, and they were always talking about it right in front of her. But they always whispered when a baby died.
“How did he die? Was he sick like Prerana diju? Will she die too? I don’t want her to die. We were planning to climb the loukat tree when she got well again. Now she’s covered with red blotches.” Sapana imagined her cousin being carried away on the back of men on green bamboo, tied up in a saffron shroud. She quickly wiped the thought out of her mind.
“Now don’t you two go up that old tree. Those branches are rickety. A branch might break and then you would be all set for the next six months. You saw what happened to Prakash, didn’t you?” Bubu asked sternly, waving a bony finger in front of Sapana’s face.
“He said he was Tarzan and he jumped out of the tree,” Sapana said, jumping up from the mat to show Bubu how Prakash Dada had done it. “He was right on top of a branch, and then he started to jump, and the branch went winggg!, and he fell. Like this,” she said, rolling on the floor to demonstrate.
“And broke his leg,” added Bubu.
“He has a white cast on his leg now,” said Sapana. Her cousin’s dare-devil exploit, which had brought him so much pain and popularity, had taken on the status of heroism in her mind. She could not help feeling that she needed a white cast, just like all her other cousins had done before her. Perhaps breaking a bone was like losing teeth. Everybody has to do it, and if you don’t, there must be something wrong with you, she thought.
“Are you planning to climb that tree?” queried Bubu, hearing the admiration in Sapana’s voice.
“Nooo,” said Sapana. I can just climb the tree up to the fork between the two branches, and just sit there, she thought. I won’t jump on the branches.
“Yes? No?” Bubu asked, waving her finger threateningly. “Do I hear a lie?”
“No, I won’t do it,” Sapana said quickly, sensing threats bubbling in Bubu’s mind.
Bubu, satisfied, went back to her peas. “Of course, Prerana’s not going to die, you silly child. She’s just got the measles. Everybody gets it,” she said, wiping the sweat from her brows.
“Did Buba get it? Did Ama get it? Did you, Bubu?” Sapana looked at Bubu, her skin hanging like a soft, washed leather pouch from the bones of her face. It was unblemished, except for two big, black moles next to her lips.
“Sure I did. I got it particularly bad. I had to stay in bed for months,” Bubu said. She remembered the hours of loneliness sleeping in the bed, recovering from sickness. But her grandmother had been there to brew her concoctions, and she had slowly recovered.
“Did everyone in your house catch it? Mami says I mustn’t go near Prerana Diju because I’ll get it, then it’ll pass to everyone, even the baby. Did your son get measles too?” Sapana added.
“No. He was too young to get measles,” Bubu answered.
“So how did he die?” Sapana knew she was going to get scolded very soon, but she had to know. She wet the tip of her index finger with spit and traced an elaborate face with three eyes on the hot tile.
“He died when I came down into the valley.” Bubu’s face, turned slightly away, looked lost in thought.
“Why did you come down, then? Why did you not stay at home?” Sapana asked. The saliva had evaporated instantly, leaving her with nothing.
“Stop asking so many questions. It’s rude. Women should not ask so many questions,” Bubu answered shortly.
“But I don’t want you to be all alone. Where are your Mamu and Buba?” Sapana asked, distressed. She could not believe Bubu was holding back this essential information from her.
“Well, it’s a little too late for me to be having a mother and father, let me tell you.” said the old woman, chuckling. “My mother and father are long dead. They lived in Bhimsen Tole, where my brother is now, and… “
“When is your brother coming, Bubu?” Sapana interrupted. Bubu complained constantly about how her brother did not come to visit her more often. Sapana had been five when she first saw Bubu’s brother. They had sat outside on the bench, talking for hours in low voices. Sapana, running up to sit next to Bubu, had felt uncomfortable, as if she was not supposed to be there. Bubu had turned to look at her with a far-away glance. Sapana knew Bubu wanted to be alone, so she had left, reluctantly. Sapana felt jealous of the brother, who only came rarely but yet got such lavish attention. Bubu belongs to our family!, she wanted to clarify to the brother. But he was so big, and had such a gruff voice, that she decided it was safer not to say it. Maybe he wanted to take Bubu back to the village. Maybe Bubu would decide she no longer wanted to live with them, pack her boxes, and leave. Bubu’s brother, in his long-drawn out drawl, talked about whose land had been bought and sold, whose daughters had gotten married, whose sons had left the village to go to the city. Two days later, he left, carrying a tin trunk filled with clothes that Bubu had bought with her savings.
“Uhh, who knows,” went on Bubu, without pausing. “He tells me he has too many things to do in the village. But he’s not too busy to come down when he needs the money. He was pampered because he was the only son. Not me. I was the eldest among eight.” Bubu shooed a crow that had been hopping closer and closer, head tilted consideringly on one side, eyeing the bowl of peas.
“I didn’t get to live with my parents very long. I was married off to another village seven kos away when I was nine years old. Same age as your Priti Diju. Just two years older than you, my girl.”
“Weren’t you sad about leaving all your friends, Bubu? Did you tell them that you wanted to live at home?” Sapana asked, troubled now. She imagined Prerana Diju getting married and going away to another place seven kos away. She didn’t even know how big a mile was. Maybe it was far away as India, or China, or even farther. How horrible. Then she would never be able to play with her Diju again.
“That would have done me a lot of good now, wouldn’t it,” said Bubu derisively. The old woman had a bite to her that could sometimes scare the children. “It was different in those days. Not like now, where you have all these girls old enough to be the mothers of five babies staying at home. Behaving like children themselves. They have no shame nowadays. All the girls then were married by eight or nine. If one was not married by then, people would begin to think there was something wrong with the girl.”
Sapana did not like it when Bubu got started to get into these frightening moods, when she suddenly became stern and started talking about marrying girls off. The worst was usually when she started singing:
euti chori, mayaki dori, abha kasle lane ho
One daughter, a thread of love, I wonder who will take her away.
Sapana hated that song. She maintained a cautious silence.
“My parents were lucky to find me my husband. He was the son of a rich family. His family was rich, they were. Owned seven cows and hillsides of land,” Bubu reminisced almost triumphantly.
“I’ll be seven in four months,” Sapana reminded Bubu. She wanted Bubu to know that she was too small to be married.
“Yes, that’s right. Seven, or eight? Seven, I think. I was nine when I got married. My husband was older, much older. Twenty-three-years older…”
“Twenty-three-years?” Sapana could not fathom this age difference. It sounded enormous.
The old woman looked at her with something like slightly condescending contempt; an almost benign malignancy. She alarmed Sapana when she became like this, almost as if she would declare that girls should still get married at nine even in these changed times. “We weren’t sitting at home going to school like you, Baba. We got married early. People didn’t look for husbands the same age, as they do nowadays. I got pregnant when I was thirteen.”
“Where’s your husband now?” Sapana asked, trying to change the conversation. She sneaked another pea into her mouth as the old woman turned to get a broom to sweep up the pods.
“The river took him. There was a massive flood, one, two years after we were married. The bridge was swept away. Then the men went down to see if they could re-build it. They say he went too close. There were lots of rocks under the water that you could not really see…”
” Did your Sasu kick you out of her house, like Sukumel did when Daya’s husband died?” Bubu swatted away the little hand that was sneaking into the bowl of peas as if it were a fly. Sapana retreated hastily. The old woman could be deceptive, appearing to be lost in her thoughts when she really wasn’t at all.
“My mother-in-law was a kind woman,” Bubu said reflectively. “Kinder than the rest. She let me live in the house until the baby was born. She could easily have sent me back to my parents house, but she didn’t. Then they thought I would have a better life if I came down to the valley, worked at one of the big houses. So they sent me down.”
“Did you want to leave your village, Bubu?” asked Sapana, anxiously. She wanted to think that Bubu was here because she wanted to be here, not because she had been forced to.
“It didn’t matter what I wanted,” said Bubu, tiredly. “Who would listen to me? But I wanted to leave too. I thought my son would have a better life down here. Old man Astha helped me to get into the Ranaji’s house. Then they sent me here because the Ranaji’s wife didn’t want me in her house.”
“Ranaji’s wife sent you here because she was afraid her husband would want to marry you. Because you were pretty. Ruku told me. She said the wife must have been jealous of you. Ruku said so.”
“Ruku is an old chatterbox,” said Bubu, straightening up and lifting her chin in the air. “She talks too much. When I came here, the eldest Dulahi-saab had just given birth. She couldn’t suckle her own child. She was a princess, you know, and princesses didn’t do that then. She was the granddaughter of Chandra Shamsher Maharaja. I hear the young women do whatever they want nowadays. Feeding children out of bottles. Whoever heard of such nonsense. The women now, they have no sense.”
“Darshana drinks out of a bottle. Will she grow up to have no sense too?”
“No. She’s a bright child. She will have sense. Anyway, they hired me to be the dhai for Mohan-raja. Yes, he was a little baby then. I remember it as if it were yesterday. Now he’s balding, he looks old.” Bubu had been happy at the idea of nursing two babies. She had imagined that the two of them would suckle her together, one on the left, the other on the right. “But they said there was not enough milk.”
“And then?” Sapana held her breath. The peas were all shelled. Inside her closed hand Sapana had a fistful of peas that she had removed from the bowl and which she was saving for later. The old woman usually went inside the kitchen after all the vegetables were done. Would she leave Sapana hanging in the middle?
Bubu ambled around for a bit, then dragged out the comb from underneath the straw mat and started to comb her hair. “So my son had to be sent away. They gave him to Hira to look after. Remember the old woman with goitre who comes here and brings us bay leaves? That was Hira.” Bubu raked the bamboo comb through her hair. “She used to come here occasionally, so the mistress asked her to look after my child for a bit of money.” She stopped to pull out the strands of silver hair entangled in the bamboo teeth. Sapana knew there was no need for prompting. The old woman was talking almost as if she was all alone.
“I remember that last day, holding him in my arms, feeling him breath before Hira took him into her back. She stopped coming to the house after that. I heard she used to come looking for me with the child in her arms, but nobody called me because they thought that if I was upset that would effect the milk.”
The sun slowly dipped down through the purple blooms of the jackaranda trees. A loud clamoring broke the silence as the crows came back home to roost in the bottlebrush branches. “And then?” said Sapana, underneath her breath.
“So then I never saw my child again. I heard he died six months later.” Bubu had found out about the death of her child only two years later. They had told her he was well and thriving. She had asked the mistress to give all of her salary to Hira. Hira later told Bubu that she never received any money, not even the promised stipend. Hira said she gave him all the food she had in the house, but that was just rice, and he couldn’t eat that, and she did not have the money to buy him any milk.
“She said that when he died he was just skin and bones…” Bubu’s face, pure silhouette in the sunset, was fathomless. But Sapana felt her pain, musky and old, curling up like smoke in the evening air.
A pack of street dogs started to howl, cutting through the sounds of the temple-bells. Sapana felt the loneliness in a way she never had before, a sharp cutting loneliness that seemed to transmit from the old woman and seep into her throat, making her heavy from hurting. She wanted to say something to comfort Bubu, but no words came. She waited, feeling the pain, dark blue as the night sky that was starting to descend. Slowly, the old woman picked up the bowl of peas, and walked into the kitchen. A few seconds later, a small bottle filled with kerosene and a wick flickered alight onto the surface of the windowsill. Only then did the little girl follow her inside.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Shannon Burns is a writer who lives in Adelaide.
The Translator
I am, you should know, by trade, a translator, which is to say I know several languages, and I can turn one language into another, as it were, so I am no amateur to this, whatever it is, if there is a name for it, which I doubt, since I haven’t come across it, and I have come across a lot of names, in many languages, but not the name for this, to what we are doing, or what I am doing, or what the world is doing with us both, whether we like it or not – and whether or not we like it I cannot honestly say.
I can turn one language into another, yet you, it would seem, have no language at all, you can barely turn your thoughts into sounds and gestures. The best I get from you is your moaning and biting, and the way you wring your hands, if they are in fact hands, since they seem to me to be somewhat like hands but not completely functional.
In any event, you won’t let me look at them closely. Every time I get near enough to study them you move away. If you are in your corner you move to the other side of the room, or you growl, or you foil my attempts in some other way, by sitting on them, for instance, or by screaming so loudly it hurts my ears.
When you scream, I am the one who is forced to move to the other side of the room, which leads me to imagine, sometimes, as I am scurrying away, that I have in fact taken on your body as you scurry away from me, from my desire to see your hands, which are in some sense sacred to you, and untouchable, although you touch them yourself, but always as if to protect them from being touched by someone else, by something else, since you won’t touch anything with your hands, other than yourself, which leads me to wonder whether they are hands at all, since hands are surely for touching, and if they do not touch perhaps they cease to be hands, and if they are in some way misshapen perhaps they cease to be what they seem to be, or seem to attempt to be, although they make no practical effort, but just by looking somewhat like hands, by having fingers and thumbs, and having the general shape of a hand, but never being used as a hand, and therefore doing nothing more than seeming like one – which strikes me as an attempt to be a hand, because it is so close to being a hand, whether it desires to be a hand or not, that it appears to want to be a hand, as if the form itself is the truest gauge of intention, although I strongly doubt it, yet it seems that way nonetheless.
It is as if, in those moments when I scurry away from you, feeling myself to be you scurrying away from me, I finally understand what it is to have those hands, which are not hands. I wonder, at those moments, or to be more precise in the aftermath of those moments, whether you have undergone a similar experience, whether you have taken on my hands while I have yours, whether you have suddenly felt yourself to be inside my body, and whether, for the briefest moment, while I am wholly disoriented and therefore incapable of watching over you, you have been able to speak.
The question of your hands is something we cannot depart from, but we will, for now, at least to a certain extent, although they must always be hovering, those hands, over everything, since without them what else?
What else, other than this, since there must be more than this, because without that what is this?
At least they are better than my eyes, which are nearly blind.
But, there again, how can one compare eyes which do not work with hands that are not, strictly speaking, hands?
It appears foolish, but at the same time strikes me as acceptable, and that seems good enough, for now, for me to depart from all this talk of hands or whatever they are, although they may hover, and let them hover for all I care, for I have cast them away with my eyes, which do not work very well, but whose mention at least has this power, so let that be the end of that.
The real question is as follows:
If I am to be you, it seems to me that I am, as a result, in a sense, to embody you, but which you? You have not yet, in truth, been allowed to speak, despite my speaking for you, as you. In truth I speak despite you, as well as for you, and with you, and because of you. In truth you are my speaking, and yet you are dumb, utterly.
For the most part you shuffle from side to side, instead of speaking, which is to say you walk in a strange way, if one could go about calling such a thing, as your gait, a walk. It is more like a dance, but without rhythm, or flow, or balance, or anything resembling the joyful expression of bodily movement. Instead you gait. There is no other way of putting it.
I have considered purchasing footwear, within which you might steady yourself, or seeking podiatric or chiropodic stimulus, in the sense of diagnosis and treatment and healing, or of teaching you to walk differently, given your lack of balance, or disease.
I say these things, I confess, as one might whisper prayers in the face of an abyss, against which we are thrown, so to speak, with little more than our selves, our basic parts, our meager substance, to subsist on. But you are not an abyss, by any means, my dear, or at the very least not merely.
If you are, as they say, enigmatic, a thing to puzzle over, a wound, let’s say, an opening, let’s say, then you are not quite an abyss, but rather an opening into flesh, with its definite tissue, its intimate warmth, its assent by touch.
Because this is the crux of the matter: I have felt your assent.
That is to say, you have said yes to me, but it was a yes, a trust, consisting entirely in touch, in touching your body with my fingers, although it’s true to say you withdrew from me in that touching, but you allowed it nonetheless, even though you were not completely there, since you seemed to take refuge in some other place, some place demonstrably inside you and therefore, I might add, bodily.
You were not there, you said yes to me. This is what I am getting at.
Perhaps you will be able to enlighten me, later on, when you have taken up some form of speaking, when you have become, in a sense, speech itself, of the place into which you withdraw. Is it a place of the past? Or is it a still place – a sanctuary, let’s say, against time, in which things are wholly unfamiliar, as a landscape in a different world, given other predicates, attuned to different sensibilities, like, for instance, a gentler form of gravity, or a porous light.
Perhaps it is a place inside you, and if I am, in fact, to draw you away from it, in a sense, with this language, to give you tools for containing it, and constituting it, and re-constituting it, then it seems to me I am doing something bodily, something concrete, and acquiescence to such a thing can only be given as touch, as I have touched you, and discovered your withdrawal, at the same time as your assent, which is at the very least an assent to something, though it only be my presence there beside you, with my hand on your mouth, covering your lips, that you might speak.
Your lips said yes, without speaking. This is how I’ve interpreted it.
There is a risk involved, undoubtedly, but if you were only there, as you are now, as you read this, then you would understand my response to your lips, as you are now, as I write this.
You are asleep.
Something in the writing of this, while you are asleep, is a digression from the ordinary work I have taken up, of becoming your story, so you might be told it from my mouth, in return, and this digression speaks of something else, something I am not entirely comfortable with in this process.
It is this.
I was leaning over you, earlier, and in a sense conjuring something, something concrete, since the feeling had crept over me quite overwhelmingly the night before, and was being repeated at that moment, earlier today, that I was in need of your touch, and that your touch, your skin, might not be entirely relied upon, and there was something about this idea, which I couldn’t put out of my head, as I lay there in the dark, last night, which I could hardly endure, which threatened to tear away at something, something altogether necessary, the loss of which would leave me utterly disrupted, let’s say catatonic, completely destroyed, erased from existence.
Yet the next day, today, I touched you, and your flesh said yes, or if it wasn’t a complete assent it was at least a partial one, since your flesh said yes to me, yes, I am here, even as you withdrew.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Angelina’s publications include short stories in Muse and AntiTHESIS, an article in VWC Magazine. Three hour book shortlisted for the 2009 Lord Mayor Creative Writing Awards. She is a recipient of the Eleanor Dark Varuna Writing Fellowship and Rosebank Residency. Angelina is a member of the ongoing Novel Writing Masterclass with Antoni Jach, Creative Writing PhD candidate and sessional tutor. Christos Tsiolkas is currently mentoring Angelina with her novel Disobedience.
Sad Clown
Most people have imaginary friends when they’re kids, especially if they’re lonely kids like Christopher Robin. Mine was a wet cement imaginary enemy.
I met Sad Clown when I was in Grade Five.
Sad Clown watched me through the window. His face was an ivory white canvas with huge black holed eyes swallowing me. Sad Clown never listened when I told him to leave. He’d just stand there crying stainless-steel tears that dried into scratches. Sad Clown waited in the bathroom, my bedroom and at the school bench near the drinking taps. He was so quiet no one except for me ever noticed him. His body was long, his shadow swallowed me.
Sad Clown’s clothes remained like a hot air balloon blackening the sun. He had special powers so I could see him with my eyes open and closed. His bent figure had explodable arms and legs dangling from my eyelashes. Other times he stole my concentration by dancing in front of the blackboard where I once answered the question one times one incorrectly. The class laughed. Sad Clown loved the way my face went red and for the rest of the term he continued to laugh for being the dumbest person he’d ever met.
I don’t know why Sad Clown chose me for a friend because I hated him. He followed me everywhere and stunk of egg wet clothes. He used to hug me all the time when I was busy watching The Gummi Bears, The Smurfs, and The Care Bears. Sad Clown left metal splinters in my skin, so I often spent afternoons in front of the TV scratching them out. Sad Clown smiled cause it hurt when Mother covered me in Dettol and Mickey Mouse and Friends bandaids.
When I started high school Sad Clown came with me. He was more excited than I was. From the very first day he sat next to me on the train. Every morning at the station he’d adjust my hair so it covered my face exactly the way he liked. Then he’d tie a string round my neck with a black balloon attached to the other end. Floating above my head everyone knew not to make friends with me.
I used to see Sad Clown everywhere. He was in the mirror at Gran’s house; eating my popcorn at the movies, vomiting on my homework, breaking the numbers on my calculator and always asking me if my school uniform made him look fat. Sad Clown had dark magic powers if he wasn’t next to me he was looking at me through every window or reflecting off every shiny surface.
I was in Year 10 when I stopped sleeping with my clothes on at night. I never wanted to get undressed with Sad Clown in my room so I never changed into my pyjamas and often avoided showering til it felt worse than being naked. To strip I had to steal some of Dad’s five litre red cask wine, skull it, and wait for it to do its thing before undoing my clothes. It didn’t matter how many times I checked the doors were locked even if it was only for a second it was hard to unbutton my own pants and take off my own bra.
At night every night Sad Clown would walk in circles round my bed with family photos in his hand. Mother always blamed me for stealing them from her photo albums. I told her it wasn’t me. She didn’t care she just wanted an image of her family back. She never believed anything I said. Mother always told me it’s not my fault I can’t tell the difference between truth and tales. She said it’s from Dad’s side of the family. Mother could never have her Kodak moments back because with the photos Sad Clown stole, he’d cut out the people he hated and set their faces on fire. My face was always the first to be cut out and burned.
Sad Clown spoke to me in rhyming couplets. He listed all the ways in which the other girls at school were so much better than me. In the bathtub full of cold water I never dared to turn the hot tap water on. One wrong move made all the difference. Sad Clown spent hours echoing my thoughts, going through every painful moment of my day. I tried not to think. I tried not to remember but I couldn’t trick Sad Clown, he had a better memory than I did.
Whenever I went to the shops or the library he came with me. He didn’t want anyone to see me so he’d throw black jellybeans at me and laugh until I dissolved in his shadow.
At home, when no one else was around, Sad Clown locked the bedroom door while he painted my face black and white. There was never any point fighting him, I’d learned very early on it was always better to let him do as he pleased. Inside the highlighter-blue walls I’d scrunch my face closed as Sad Clown rearranged my face til it got lost.
Whenever the phone rang Sad Clown pounced on my hands. Sitting beneath his warning eyes I listened to the phone, hammer by hammer hitting each ring further into my eardrums til the noise couldn’t be beaten in anymore and finally rang out. Sad Clown hated me talking to anyone. Each time the phone rang the cream Telstra handle black, the noise screeched louder in my ears, Sad Clown’s forbidding eyes grew, year by year, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute larger, darker, hungrier he ate all my colours. I watched the red in my veins turn bruise purple-blue and die black before Sad Clown gave me permission to move.
After I got my first period something inside me changed. Everyone said I was a woman and maybe that was what made it easier for me to start pretending Sad Clown didn’t exist. Even though Sad Clown continued to follow me for a few more years after I’d became a lady, there was always a distance between us. It was like an imaginary line had been drawn and it was more powerful than Sad Clown and Uncle Santo put together. I don’t know where this line came from or how I knew it was there cause I couldn’t see it. I don’t even know what colour it was but whatever that line was made of, neither Sad Clown nor Uncle Santo could cross it.
Sad Clown taught me about the safety that lives inside the colour black and silence, the only place to hide in. Sad Clown never said goodbye or made a big deal about leaving when the doctor adjusted her spectacles and handed me my first prescription for making sadness go away. Day by pill-stilted day, month by pill-paralysed month, gradually, Sad Clown stopped watching me through the window. More months went by, I swallowed more pills and stared at the mirror watching Sad Clown and I dissolve together, a little pill-induced further each day, til we both faded and blended into some kind of sleep-world. Once I stopped taking all the different types of medication, I ended up swallowing over the two years,
I began to wake up
Sad Clown doesn’t even breathe in his sleep.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Patrick West has been published in The Penguin Book of the Road (Ed. Delia Falconer, 2008), The Best Australian Stories (Black Inc.) in 2006 and 2008, Southerly, Going Down Swinging, Antipodes, and many other places. Besides being a fiction writer, he is also an academic, essayist, scriptwriter and poet. Patrick is currently a Senior Lecturer in Professional and Creative Writing at Deakin University, Melbourne campus.
Spurned Winged Lover
Someone, somewhere, switched a radio on, switched on a kettle for tea, adjusted the volume, and . . .
“. . . in financial news, the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Martin Gould, announced today that he would be taking early retirement and stepping down from his position at the end of the year. Analysts have been expecting this announcement for some time and market reaction was muted. Interest rates are expected to remain on hold for the eleventh consecutive month after Tuesday’s Bank meeting despite recent strong housing market indicators combined with wages growth and inflationary pressures. Meanwhile, in other news . . .”
. . . somewhere, someone, a woman, switched a radio off. Alice Gander had her books to attend to. ‘Observed this morning’, she wrote in copperplate, ‘a white-fronted tern (non-breeding) cowering half dead on the back lawn. I was able to approach almost to touch it. According to Slater, the species is an accidental visitor, or vagrant, in these parts. Some of the locals have been giving it a hard time. The storm must have blown it in from the ocean.’
Alice sugared her tea. What twitcher could be better blessed? Airy doppelgängers in the mirrored surfaces of Sydney’s skyscrapers aside, the squalls blowing hard off the Pacific met with no obstacles before they gusted into her closely watched garden. How many lost souls, rare fowls borne high over NSW, had dropped on Alice’s doorstep down the years?
Martin’s face still itched from the pan-caking before the media conference. The make-up girl always laid it on too thick, he thought to himself, made him look like—he wasn’t sure what it made him look like (owlish perhaps?). He got up from his office desk. A small mirror hung on the back of the door. But before he could get to it, a sharp knock sounded.
When the Asian crisis hit, and every galah with column inches to fill was screeching for one thing one day, and the very opposite the next, not many on the board had sided with Martin. But Lloyd Collins had. Former blue-chip speculator with the blue eyes, and ambitious as hell underneath, his next birthday was one of those with a zero at the end. His enemy? Time.
“Fronting those press bastards gives anyone a mother of a thirst. A man’s not a camel. Are you up for a beer or several?” The two men drank at The Waterloo after success and after failure. And the bigger the success, or the bigger the failure, the more that they drank.
As he grabbed his jacket from the hook behind the door, Martin suddenly glimpsed himself. Read my lips, he thought: “Not a camel and not an owl.”
Instantly Lloyd swivelled as if a skater on (thin) ice. “Got something to say?”
Martin thought he hadn’t said it, but he had said it. . . .
“No mate, nothing to say.”
The announcement of the tern’s presence could wait until the club meeting on Sunday evening. Alice had a feeling it could do without the ocean for a little while.
It was warm for the last days of autumn. Martin and Lloyd undid the top buttons on their shirts, and tugged slightly at their ties, as they walked to The Waterloo. Jackets were slung over shoulders. Journalists and other financial types were at the bar, mobiles like amulets, and they decided to sit outside—although lunchtime’s news was already stale.
“Beer?”
“Thanks Lloydie. Get one for yourself too.” He could still smile.
Stepping into The Waterloo from the glare was like falling down a coal pit—not that Lloyd had ever been into one of those. He tripped a little on the way to the bar. “Are you next in line?” Lloyd took a second to see who was asking. It was no-one. Just some cub reporter.
“Can’t you see that I am?” A moment passed before he got it. “No comment. Get lost.”
Alice’s town was high on a mountain on the slope facing the sea. The sea, which was out of sight. Population of town: 2 854. Height above sea level in feet: 2 854. The tourists were wrong to think that someone, somewhere, was having them on. The sign was right. And it made the inhabitants feel chuffed, as if somehow they each had special possession of twelve inches of the mountain responsible for a view that reached almost, if not quite, to the ocean.
Lloyd held the frothing glasses high out in front of his chest, like offerings of frankincense, incense or myrrh, as he backed through the door, and once more into the sunlight. One elbow brushed over the sign ‘No Work Boots, Dirty Clothes or Singlets Allowed.’ When it came to getting plastered, Lloyd was the perfect nationalist. Two VBs clattered together.
“Get that down you.”
“Just watch me. I’ll murder it.”
Yellow Caterpillar machines were chomping at the earth on the work site across the road. The clinking of glasses was lost in the roar of machinery. And in the yells above the roar.
Martin gently blew the froth of his beer across the street. Lloyd could never resist a metaphor—in every monthly meeting there was a bit of poetry. “That’s all we’re doing to the economy. Blowing bubbles at it. We need to scare the markets badly before New Year.”
“I’ll make some noises on Wednesday and that’ll be enough” Martin said. (And then: “Can I be straight with you? With Patricia gone my heart’s just not in it anymore.”)
‘Observed a pair of spur-winged plovers feeding by the dam,’ wrote Alice.
Martin thought he had said it, but he hadn’t said it. . . .
“But they’re onto you mate. The proof’s right before your eyes.” He pointed. Two men in white shirts had pulled up across the road. One of them was getting a pair of hard hats from the back seat. Martin jolted into alertness just in time to see the men grinning at each other as they entered the work site. Cigarettes were being offered to the drivers of the Caterpillars.
“Do you really expect me to nudge the rate next week just because I saw a couple of developers handing out smokes on a Friday afternoon? That’s full moon stuff, Lloydie.”
“There are worse reasons,” said Lloyd (who was trying to think of one).
“And much better. Any high school economics student could tell you. I’ll say that we’re monitoring the situation constantly.” (Can’t he hold his horses a bit longer? I’m not gone yet. This bloody politics is exactly why I want to leave.)
That and Patricia’s death, of course—six months, two weeks, one day ago now. . . .
“My shout, Lloydie.”
“You’re a legend.”
The white-fronted tern had finally found the bird-bath and Alice was settled in at her living room window with a pair of binoculars. Its chest was trembling. “I’m sorry you had to end up here like this,” whispered Alice. And although it was only a whisper, and she was fifty feet away behind glass, the bird seemed, for an instant, to cock its head in her direction. Alice shushed herself. A good bird-watcher should appear never to be there at all.
From autumn ending, to summer beginning, Alice watched her white-fronted tern survive in her backyard. One night she woke, as if from a nightmare, with the thought that it had gone back to the ocean. “Why am I so concerned about you?” she said to herself. There had been several further entries in her list of new birds for the area since the tern. Just yesterday, a rare species of wren that you normally didn’t see until you were on the plains far below.
All the members of the local bird observers club had been around to see the famous tern that had rejected the ocean for the terracotta billows of Alice’s bird-bath. Once she’d been a new arrival herself. Each member had added her then, at that first shyly joined twitchers’ excursion, to privately kept lists of exotic creatures encountered. Now she was the club secretary and very good at it too. Sometimes she dreamed of even more lofty promotion. . . .
In the end, Lloyd was it. And that evening he did his best to drink The Waterloo dry.
And summer came to a sudden end, with an out-of-season storm, and just as suddenly, although he could have afforded to live anywhere in the world (Bermuda, Burma or Belgrade) Martin was there in the town, at his first meeting of the local bird observers club.
For he needed new pastimes now. And as a boy he’d kept pigeons once, riding his bike great distances through the suburbs, with the birds snugly in a wooden box with breathing holes, strapped to the rack. They always beat him home, but would sometimes circle for hours, before entering the loft made of packing cases sawed in two, as he watched from the ground. “So who got home first really?” his mother had asked once, pouring a red cordial.
“That’s a wonderful story. But domestic pigeons are a real pest up here,” said the club secretary, as she took down Martin’s details and made up his membership card. It was the first new member in two years. “Gould, you’ve got the right name for our group at least.”
After introductions, there were the reports on fresh sightings and strange behaviour. Martin ventured that he’d seen some magpies while he was driving around town yesterday, looking at houses. They had smiled not unkindly at that.
Finally the president cleared his throat. It was the meeting to elect new officials for the year ahead. “Unlucky you,” whispered Alice to Martin, who was sitting alongside her.
Everyone was happy to continue as they were, except for one, who had a funny feeling about money.
“I’ll do it,” said Martin.
(Lloyd would have loved this.)
“Are there any other nominations?” No-one spoke up. “I therefore declare Martin Gould elected treasurer,” said the president.
“I can show you the ropes if you like,” said the ex-treasurer.
“I’ll manage,” said Martin.
As the meeting drifted into chit-chat about chats over coffee, the president came over.
“Do you mind me asking what you did before retirement?”
“Mr President,” replied Martin (he who had spoken to real presidents in his day) “once upon a time I did very boring things with numbers.” He typed in the air as if at an imaginary keyboard. “Now, tell me more about these binoculars I should be buying.”
“Now he’s one of us,” said Alice, and walked towards the window to gaze at the sea that couldn’t be seen, even on the clearest of days, at 2 854 feet.
The next day, the sign at the entrance to the town still gave the same population figure, but who can doubt that the residents would have walked at least a foot taller, if they had known that the ex-Governor of the Reserve Bank was now living amongst them?
‘It’s funny how little we mean to people up here,’ Martin emailed Lloyd, who didn’t reply.
It was almost a year before Alice worked up the courage to invite Martin to her place to complete some paperwork for the club. “I suggest that we get an ABN but don’t register for GST,” said Martin, as she showed him around her garden. By the bird-bath was a little cross. Having forgotten it was there, Alice gave the cross a casual tap, as if it were only a gardening stake or the like, when she saw that Martin was about to ask something or other.
Of course she knew by now that he used to live in Sydney. “Do you miss the ocean?”
“It’s much better up here. I’m not sure why people are so keen to retire to the coast. Once you get used to the sound of the waves what else is there to do?”
“Our little town is dying. They say the bank is going to close down next year and we’ll have to drive over an hour to do our banking. Don’t they make enough money already?”
“It’s no good, I know,” said Martin.
A honeyeater had alighted above the grave of the white-fronted tern.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing. Martin still didn’t know all the names.
“That’s an eastern spinebill,” she said, and swallowed hard. Soon there were three of them, using the cross as a perch to make dashes across the bird-bath: Father, Son and . . . Alice caught herself before going on with a thought she couldn’t be certain wasn’t blasphemous.
“You’re not happy, Alice, are you?”
“I’m not happy, I’m Alice,” she said, and smiled at the sheer silliness of that.
They shared a pot of tea in her living room with views towards the ocean. Swallows and swifts were silhouettes in the sky whose precise species could not be determined under such conditions. Their darting flights were like thin black cracks along which segments of heaven might suddenly fracture and fall to earth.
Alice wasn’t sure if she was drinking with Martin after success or after failure.
“Would you like another cup? Or perhaps some more of those biscuits?”
“Don’t get up Alice. I’m perfectly content as I am.”
In The Waterloo, so close to the ocean you can almost smell the salt over the scent of beer when the wind blows from the east, Lloyd was drinking with a crew-cutted journalist.
“Do you remember the first time we met?”
“I think I told you to get lost.”
“To be precise, you said ‘No comment. Get lost.’ That was the day Gould said he was going.”
“Thank the lord for that!”
“He stuffed up pretty badly, don’t you think?”
“Off the record?”
“Lloydie. . . .”
“Anyway it was obvious to anyone who knew him. He took his wife’s death pretty badly and made some poor decisions. We’re all still suffering from that. He’s up the bush now.”
The courtship habits of hundreds of birds were no mystery to Alice. On the next club outing, she pointed out to Martin the remains of a nest that had once seen the birth of an oriental cuckoo. The others weren’t interested and had kept going along the winding path.
Should she risk it now? No-one could be closer than two or three turns of the track away.
“I know you’re still in love with Patricia.”
The next moment the sky was full of martins. Martins everywhere. Swarms of martins, cutting the sky into the tiniest of pieces. Surely, surely, it was going to fall now. Her one hope had been pushed over the side of its nest by an impostor. She had seen a cuckoo actually do this—the cruel kindnesses of nature. Alice felt as if her heart were swarming.
He could be firm, Martin, when he needed to be. Quite calmly, he made an echo of his previous question: “What bird is that?” And this time Alice looked where he was looking.
“It’s called a spurned winged lover.”
How foolish, how embarrassing, to have said that. . . .
“Alice, I. . . .”
“I should never have said anything.”
The spur-winged plover took to the air. Now the ex-treasurer of the bird observers club (the woman who felt funny about money) was rushing back with news of an exciting discovery just up ahead.
“It’s a first for us,” she gushed. “Do come and see it.”
“Alright,” said Alice. But there was something she wanted to point out to Martin first.
Broken shells of cuckoo and another species of bird were pressed into the dirt by the edge of the path. But that wasn’t what she wanted to show him.
“The spur-winged plover is really quite unremarkable around here,” she said, and, for now, Martin Gould and Alice Gander each agreed to leave it at that.
Then began a cycle of wild swings and outlandish corrections, predictions of disaster topped by predictions of catastrophe, compensations where none were required and the loss of resolve where resolve was all that anyone had. The numbers told the story but a million wild acres of newsprint made certain no economic hornet’s nest was left unprodded. To fall harder than your neighbour had fallen became almost a badge of honour. People really did end up sweeping Wall Street who once had worked there. People really did just disappear.
“International conditions . . .” Lloyd Collins started, but even he knew that was hopeless, and on TV and radio you could hear the hesitation in his voice as the words spilled from his mouth in increasingly confused combinations. At least, as one journalist put it, the end, when it came, was clean. The Governor of the Reserve Bank fell on his own sword.
As for interest rates? Well, what was Bradman’s test cricket average? “Smart arse,” said Collins, under his breath, at the journalist with the crew cut and the premature baldness. Then, just a fraction louder, “What’s that on your head? The recession you had to have?”
A couple, somewhere, switched a radio on, switched on a kettle for tea, adjusted the volume, and . . .
“. . . in financial news, the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Lloyd Collins, announced today that he would be retiring from his position effective immediately. Analysts have been expecting this announcement for some time. According to the ABC’s chief financial commentator, Ian Peacock, ‘once the tortoise got away the hare was never going to catch up. The Reserve Bank was blowing bubbles into the hurricane.’ Meanwhile, in other news . . .”
. . . somewhere, two people, a happily engaged couple, switched a radio off.
“What will happen to him do you think?” asked Alice.
“I don’t know,” Martin answered, smiling. “Maybe he’ll move in across the road. After all, ex-Governors of the Reserve Bank are quite unremarkable around here.”
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Stephanie Ye (1982) is a Singaporean writer. A graduate of the University of Chicago, she currently works as a journalist. Her poetry and fiction have been published in the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore (qlrs.com).
Cardiff
You change out of your school uniform into street clothes in the Bishan station washroom, then take the MRT to Lavender. Ten stops, one transfer. The east-bound train is packed, people’s folded umbrellas dripping water onto the floor, the seats, other passengers. This train is sponsored by an international bank, advertising the new savings programme it has cooked up for the Singapore market. On the windows are pasted large thought bubbles positioned to seem like they are emanating from the heads of the people seated on the benches that line the walls. “Will we be able to afford a holiday in Europe?” worries an Ah Soh wearing a quixotic amount of makeup on her wilting visage. She has long green fingernails and toenails, like the spikes of some exotic and poisonous creature. “Can I afford to take care of Mum?” ponders a sleeping Bangladeshi worker, whose bulging FairPrice plastic bag swings ponderously between his knees as the train jerks to a halt.
She is already waiting in the open-air carpark next to the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority building, reading a paperback. You pull your foldable umbrella from your backpack, but it turns inside-out in the wind and you’re soaked anyway as you wade across the asphalt, your track shoes going squish, squish, squish. You can see the cover of the book, distorted through the rivulets running down the windscreen, as she lays it on the dashboard. It is one of those chick lit novels done up in violent pink with a large photograph of the author on the back. For a literature teacher, she has terrible taste in novels.
“You’re late,” she greets you as you open the car door and quickly shove yourself in, though not quickly enough to prevent large raindrops from spattering the fake leather upholstery. She twists to rummage through the backseat and tosses you a scratchy scarf-looking thing. You actually have a sports towel in your bag, but you use it anyway. It smells like her.
“If you would pick me up from school, I wouldn’t be late,” you reply. The windscreen wipers thrash to life with a thudding sound. You watch her profile as she puts the car into drive and navigates out of the lot, the way her pupil seems to float in a green lake when viewed from the side. You love to watch her drive. You feel so safe in the warm submarine stillness of the car, a tank against the raging monsoon.
“You know very well that’s out of the question.” She fumbles with the radio, the static crackling into the pushy voice of a DJ, exhorting listeners to call now, call now and you could win… “Did you take a shower?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s not very considerate of you.”
“Sorry. But the guys’ showers are like damn gross lah. There’s gunk and everything. I’m better off not going in there.”
She glances at you, you think to show some interest, then you realise she is checking her blind spot. “Anyway, isn’t it time you stopped playing so much football and started studying?”
“Excuse me, are you trying to tell me I’m a lousy student?” Of course, you know you are not; you are by no means the best, but you’re certainly not the worst either. If anything, you are solidly, consistently OK, which sounds pretty mediocre except that you’re in reputedly the best school in the city-state, meaning you’re at least the average of the best in Singapore. For what that’s worth.
“Of course you’re not lousy.” She slows as the car goes through a huge puddle with a mournful whoosh, blurring the windscreen with fans of water. “But if you’re serious about wanting to go to the UK for uni, you’ll have to do well for your As.”
“Not really. I really only want to go to Cardiff. It’s not that picky.”
“Oh, thank you for holding my alma mater in such high regard.”
“Don’t be so touchy lah.” You can tell she’s not really offended. “I just mean, it’s not, like, Cambridge or something. Anyway, I don’t know anyone else who wants to go there, so I’m sure they’d be happy to take me, the token Singaporean.”
“It’s not just about getting in — you’ll need one of those government scholarships — unless your parents have stumbled upon loads of cash they’d forgotten about? Have you thought about your applications for those? You have to be the cream of the crop to get one, right?”
Of course she’s right and you know she knows and so you don’t answer. You gaze out the window at the dark green rain trees by the roadside, sliding past, their branches like frozen bolts of lightning. It is afternoon, but the storm makes it seem like it is much later, or earlier: a timeless state.
“Then again, you have to ask if it’s really worth it,” she continues. “They pay for four years of uni, but you have to spend six years in the civil service – there’s obviously an imbalance built into that. I’ve always thought that was rather sneaky of them, wooing starry-eyed 18-year-olds with promises of a posh education, then turning them into indentured cubicle monkeys.”
“Better than not getting to study overseas at all.”
“That’s what exchange programmes are for. Besides, half the professors at the local Us are from abroad anyway.” She shrugs. “Even lowly A-level lit teachers like me.” She’s being self-deprecating; they only import ang mohs like her for the top junior colleges, and only for the humanities subjects, the theory being that white people can teach subjects that involve a lot of words better than the locals. Talk about a colonial hangover. But you have to admit, your favourite teachers are white. You find them more interesting to talk to.
Even then, there’s a lot of things she just doesn’t get. Like the whole wanting to go abroad to study thing. An expat like her should understand the need to live someplace else for a while, to just get the hell out of the place you were born. Or maybe that’s not even a consideration for her; maybe she’s just getting paid more to be here. You can’t really blame her like that. But how to explain? You can’t find the words to unravel the knot of emotions suddenly swelling in your chest. This feeling of cosmic and cruel injustice, that of all the random places in all the world to be from, you had to be from here. This place so tiny. Insignificant. Unsophisticated. Hot. Except when it rains.
“I’m just sick of Singapore, I guess,” you finally say. The car has stopped at a red light, and for a while the two of you sit in the burble of an ‘80s power ballad as you watch some unlucky pedestrians pirouette across the road, swaying under umbrellas and open newspapers like high-wire acrobats.
“Cardiff’s not going to be all that different, my dear. I don’t know what romantic notions you’ve got in your head, but it’s very much like Singapore. It’s a city. All cities are essentially alike.”
“Cardiff’s not the same as Singapore,” you say firmly. “It gets seasons.”
“True,” she admits. “I suppose if there’s anything I miss about Cardiff, it’s the change of season. An eternal summer can get quite tedious.”
Summer. You slowly drag a finger across the windowpane, as if you could brush away the raindrops on the other side. Spring, summer, autumn, winter. Otherworldly markers for the passage of time, in a city on the edge of the equator.
***
She books the room for three hours, saying she has to be home for dinner by eight. Back when this all first began, you were a little depressed by the bare-bones efficiency of these rooms – just a bed, a TV, a lamp, an electric kettle, two Boh teabags. The curtains are thick enough to shut out the murky sunlight, but crashes of thunder, the tapping of rain and the blare of horns on Bencoolen Street filter through the glass. It is not a space to stay in for long. But over time you’ve come to see that it is elegant in its economy. All a man needs and nothing more. You kick off your track shoes and take off your wet clothes and hang them to dry on the back of the door, then take a quick shower. When you get out she is watching Channel NewsAsia, the weather report. Rain is general all over South-east Asia.
You are always surprised by how fair she is. It isn’t that pallid fairness that Chinese girls are, a pale yellowness like tea-stained teeth. Her skin is luminous, almost bluish, and completely without any scars or blemishes, as if her girlhood in Cardiff had been free of sports, vaccinations and other mishaps. As you make love, every inch of her body turns from blue to pink, and her green eyes take on a faded, watercolour quality. Even the rain must be softer in Cardiff.
Afterwards, she lies on a towel and continues reading her book while you try to take a nap. Rain usually makes you sleepy, but the drumming on the windowpane seems exceptionally loud, and you end up watching her instead. It still amazes you, being so close to her. You remember that first day when she walked into class, she was wearing a light blue blouse made of some kind of satin and a black form-fitting skirt with heels, not the slutty kind but rather geometric and eye-catching, like high-tech gadgets. Her dark hair was twisted up in a knot and she was wearing a brownish-pink lipstick. Your whole class, both guys and girls, fell dead silent. She is that beautiful.
“For a literature teacher, you have terrible taste in novels,” you say.
She harrumphs, not taking her eyes off the page. “Shut up. Wait till you’ve spent all night marking essays on the Mill on the bloody Floss.”
“Are we that bad, Mrs. Williams?” you ask, reaching out to stroke the back of her thigh.
You feel the impact even before you register that about 400 pages of pulp romance and fashion swaddled in pink have just descended on your head. It hurts, but you know you deserved it and so you don’t move, don’t say anything.
“I told you not to call me that when we’re here,” she says evenly.
Your head throbs to the beating of your heart. You put your hand back on her skin, still warm and slick. You close your eyes. “I’m sorry,” you say. You are, really. But you don’t open your eyes to see if the apology is accepted. Instead, behind your eyelids you fly over the sea and through the sky, punching the turbulent thunderclouds and shrugging off the raindrops, heading for Cardiff.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Michael Sala was born in Holland in 1975, in the town of Bergen Op Zoom, and he grew up moving between Europe and Australia. His autobiographical work, Memory Vertigo, was short-listed for the Vogel/Australian Literary Award in 2007. His work has since then been published in HEAT, Best Australian Stories 2009, Charlotte Wood’s Brothers and Sisters, and Harvest. He is currently working on a novel and short story collection while living and teaching in Newcastle.
Free Style
Richard was busy turning his daughter into a mermaid when he saw two former students walk onto the sand. They’d been a couple for as long as he’d known them, a pair that had latched together early in high school to become a sort of romantic entity. Maybe fixture was a better word. They weren’t holding hands today. He supposed that they were nineteen or twenty by now, yet they seemed older. The boy in particular looked older. It was the way that he carried himself, his gaze locked in heavy glasses, head sagging, as if his chest were collapsing beneath its own weight. His pale upper body looked like something hefted from a shell.
The girl peeled off her dress with both hands to reveal a blue full-piece swimsuit with a white racing stripe down the side, the kind that Richard’s mother might have worn. She dropped the dress and stood there clutching her elbows without even a glance at her companion. Neither of them spoke. Richard couldn’t figure it out. There was no joy in them. What did they have to feel tired about? He had to admit this though; seeing them like that gave him a quiet sense of self-satisfaction. Perhaps it was relief.
Richard was probably no more than ten years older than they were and yet he thought about death often, as if it were just around the corner, as if he were an old man with nothing better to do than wait for its arrival. He didn’t talk about it. But whenever he allowed his mind to stray, the thought of it pulled him down. For all that, right now he felt much younger and healthier than the way these two looked and acted, and you had to be happy about that. You had to take your satisfaction where you could find it.
The couple walked to the edge of the water. Richard hadn’t seen them touch yet. He told himself that as soon as they touched, he would look away. They were hugging their own bodies, standing arm’s length apart, facing the wideness of the sea. The young man was shivering. It was mid-spring, but an icy wind sheared across the cool water. There was no one else at the beach. A reef further out broke the waves so that the swell was gentle as it washed back and forth around their knees.
‘Do I look pretty?’ May said suddenly.
‘I’ve never seen anything more beautiful,’ he replied, glancing back at his daughter.
‘Oh you have,’ she said, ‘I’m sure you have.’
May pressed her lips together and looked down to her hands. Sometimes his daughter would say things like that and it wasn’t her speaking at all, but someone else, and her tone, the look in her eyes, was a stranger’s, although it would shift away almost immediately into her own expressions – or maybe they were his. Maybe the parts that he thought really belonged to her were simply those that came from him. Maybe that was why he kept all of this up.
May had his tanned skin, and the same distant, slightly amused look in her eye that had passed down from Richard’s grandfather to his mother and through him to her. And perhaps she had the same way of thinking? You’re always somewhere else. That was something his wife had used to say to him. Sometimes he wondered if his daughter would eventually come to that conclusion about him too. Maybe she already had. It was hard to tell with a five-year-old. But he tried to bring himself back as often as possible, when he was with her, to be as attentive as a father should be. Not that he ever felt that it was enough.
The wind kicked up, autumn in it already. He looked back out at the water. The young couple were in past their waists. They stood there, staring out to sea, not speaking, hugging themselves. It was as if they stood before a precipice. Richard wanted to see something playful happen between them, a push, laughter, a shivering embrace. Instead, the young man stiffened – Richard wondered if it was at a remark – and began wading out of the water. When the sea had slid away from everything but his ankles and feet, he put his hands on his hips, dropped them again and turned to watch his girlfriend.
She was swimming away from him, freestyle, long, lazy strokes, as if she might go on forever. When she reached the edge of the reef, she found her feet and stood up. Only her head and shoulders and upper arms lifted from the water, but a straightness came into her, or perhaps it was just the angle Richard saw her from, the way the light struck upon the sea. They stood like this for a long time. Richard couldn’t look away. He could see the side of the man’s face, the perplexed, expectant shape of his expression, its nakedness without the glasses. Despite his shivering, the young man did not move out of the water or go deeper into it. His girlfriend dipped her head into the soft debris of waves folding over the edge of the reef and stared at the horizon, her hair dark and slick against her neck.
‘I need some wet sand,’ May said.
Richard looked at her. She was watching him, her upturned palms arranged either side of her body. The tail of the mermaid, sculpted from damp sand, curved away from her narrow, tanned waist.
‘Why?’ he said.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘I can’t get it. I don’t want to ruin my tail.’
‘But why do you need wet sand?’
She pointed at the join between her waist and the tail. ‘For the pattern.’
Richard looked at her for a moment longer.
‘You know,’ he said softly, ‘we came to this beach not long after we found out that you were on the way.’
‘I know, daddy.’
There was something oddly grown-up in her tone. Richard turned back to the sea. The woman was finally wading towards the man who stood there waiting, hands dangling by his hips. The man didn’t break into motion until they were side by side. They exited the water together, but still without touching. He watched them resort silently to their towels.
‘The sand, Daddy.’
‘Wait a second.’
As they drew near, Richard hesitated against the tension in his arms, and held his body low against the sand. He didn’t want to talk to them. He couldn’t remember their names. He didn’t want to feel that weight of high school, the role it demanded, the self-consciousness that came bearing down whenever he spoke to students. No matter how friendly they were, there was always this sense that they had him at a disadvantage, that they knew more about him than he did about them. He tended to feel that way about the whole world.
Once the couple had left the beach, however, he jumped to his feet and ran down to the edge of the water – he wanted to revel in his body all of a sudden, prove its vitality – scooped up a handful of dripping sand, and ran back again. He dropped it into May’s waiting hands, and turned back for more.
‘I don’t need any more,’ she called after him.
Richard nodded, washed his hands and glanced across at a solitary barnacle-covered rock, taller than he was, that rose just where the waves foamed and dissolved into the sand. On an impulse, he ran towards it, leaped up onto a ledge halfway along and then stepped up onto the top. He stared at the wildness of the landscape, the sheer sandstone cliffs, the stretch of the coast that had hardly changed in many thousands of years, the sea. Shading his eyes with one hand, he pictured himself suddenly as someone else, a figure from the far-off past.
Pre-history.
Back then he might have been one of the wise hunting elders of some sort of tribe. That would have been him. He could run fifteen kilometres and swim forever, through summer, through winter. Despite his obsessions over death, he was in the prime of his life. He stood on the rock, flexing his legs and imagined running down a mammoth in some lost, distant epoch, leading a stone-age group of hunters from one success to another, with no long, painful memory to burden him, just the vitality of surviving each day, the pared back immediacy of that sort of life. Yes, it would have suited him.
May was waving to him. He waved back at her and rather than climbing down, jumped from the rock. The place where he jumped looked shallow, but that was an illusion created by the movement of sand through a wave dissolving back into the ocean. Instead of landing on something solid and predictable, he fell into a perplexing space, toppled backwards and hit his head against the rock from which he had jumped.
The blow cracked through his body and a spasm of nausea rolled along his insides. He floated backwards in the water, took a breath, coughed and flailed his arms, but he felt so dazed that he couldn’t find purchase in the sand beneath him and his head went under. Something brushed against his face. It was gentle and feathery and then exploded into a searing agony.
The softness kept moving, ahead of that pain by a fraction, clinging to his mouth and cheeks, fixing to his neck. He knew what it was; a Portuguese man o war, a bluebottle. Richard had seen them stranded in clusters along the edge of the sand. Most of them were so withered and dry that they crackled underfoot. The wind had been blowing them onshore for days.
Discover one of those delicate structures, shrivelled on the beach, and you might mistake it for a jellyfish, but it isn’t. It isn’t even one animal, rather four colonies of creatures locked in a deep, communal embrace. One kind of creature makes up the inflatable sail that deflates to dive from danger or tilts to stay wet, another makes up the digestive organs, another the sexual organs, and the last creature is spread through the dark blue, wandering coils that trail up to fifty metres and cling so tentatively to the skin before releasing their poison.
If Richard had had a choice in that arrangement, he’d have been the sexual organs, without a doubt. Just producing and producing, in the constant buzz of pleasure and creation, lost in the heady state of beginnings, not having to worry about when to submerge or when to dip from side to side. Ah, the sexual organs. He thought of the last time a woman’s vagina had settled across his face and how much he had enjoyed it – little had he known how long it would be before it happened again – and then his fingers found the sandy bottom beneath him and he pushed. His feet came under him and he rose into the air, shirt plastered to his body, pain clamouring inside his skull. He unpeeled the blue cord patterned across his face.
A woman had come to sit on the beach, not far from where his daughter played. She glanced at Richard, and he smiled back. As if this was just what you did. He lurched forward a step, felt heavy in his dripping pants and shirt, picked at the thin thread around his neck, tangled in the bristles of his day old growth, but his fingers were clumsy and his body shivered with the weak, sickly acceptance of the poison feeling its way inside. Flames leaping from his neck, the thread tight on his skin at the throat each time he swallowed.
His wife had been like this, a year past, rope around her neck, something playful in the tangle of the knot, as if you could unravel it with a single pull, her face slack as if it had been carved out of wax, the eyes so empty, you could never make the mistake of seeing anything alive in them. She had been hanging from the rafter in the garage, her body turning towards him when he opened the door. The eyes hadn’t been dead, just empty, like rooms left unfurnished, and it was only then that you realised how much motion there was in a living face, how much tension and complicated push and pull and endless current kept together an expression, even one that hardly moved.
Richard pulled off the last threads, took another step and slumped beside his daughter who was still focused on the intricate lacework that she was scrawling across the firmly packed sand where it cupped her waist. Her hair fluttered in the breeze. There was a faint flush to the skin of her left cheek. She was humming under her breath. The woman nearby was watching.
His heart felt as if it might spill out onto the sand. He had a terrible headache. There was a burn across his mouth. He had the urge to vomit. He ran the towel over the raw welts on his neck and forced himself to hold onto each breath for a few seconds.
‘Daddy?’
He heard May say this, but it felt as if he were listening to an answering machine and a voice that had long since lost its demand for a response.
‘Daddy?’
He ran the towel from one end of his neck to the other, felt the heat, the way it filled his head and chest and made his extremities cold.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Why are you crying?’
He didn’t look at her.
‘Is it because you didn’t want to get wet?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to get wet.’
Her fingers felt cool on his elbow, the tips at the crook of the joint.
‘Don’t worry,’ she assured him. ‘You’ll dry up soon.’
While his daughter sat on the couch watching cartoons, Richard cooked a soup with vegetables and lentils and sausages. No matter what went on in your life, a friend had advised him once, you had to eat, stick to the basic routines. During dinner, May noticed the welts on his face. Sitting beside him at the table, she touched them. He found himself mesmerised by her large blue eyes, the intense concentration in them, as if she were trying to read a story in those marks.
‘What happened?’
‘Bluebottles.’ Richard spoke to May the way he spoke to everyone. ‘At the beach. One got me on the face and the neck too.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I was upset. I didn’t want to talk about it.’
Her hand paused against his mouth. ‘Just because you’re upset, you can still talk, you know.’
‘I know,’ he said.
‘Good. That’s good, Daddy.’
She hadn’t touched the soup yet.
‘What’s up with dinner?’ he asked.
‘Oh you know.’ She picked up her spoon, stared at the soup for a moment longer, and then stirred it desolately. ‘There’s only one thing that I like in this soup. Just one.’
She looked up at him. Richard looked away. May sighed. Her spoon clinked against the bowl. She made a show of dipping her spoon into the soup, sifted through it as if she were panning for gold, then brought it to her lips and emptied its contents into her mouth.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘there are two things in here that I like.’
‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘That’s good.’
Afterwards they sat together in her bed. She read some stories to him, and he read some to her. Then she turned onto her side. He lay down beside her. Their faces were separated by the width of a hand.
‘I get lonely sometimes,’ she said.
‘Yeah? When?’
‘Oh, you know, when I’m in bed. I get lonely in my bed.’
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Me too.’
‘Can I sleep in your bed tonight?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘There are times in your life when you have to sleep by yourself. Besides, you’ve got Rainbow.’
Rainbow was a bright white, over-stuffed rabbit as big as she was. Rainbow took up half the bed.
His daughter nodded, as if she’d expected him to say just that. ‘I’m not tired at all.’
‘Just lie here. Close your eyes. You’ll be asleep before you know it.’
Richard stroked her hair. She began snoring. The sea sighed through her half-open window and he could sense it expanding from the nearby coast, the way it did when evening came, filling up the air, lapping at the houses and old apartments that sprawled along the coastline, creeping inside in dreamy, floating currents of salt that whispered of loss and indifference and those first long gone sparks of life.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
In 2009 Patrick was awarded his PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Newcastle, Australia, where he also taught CW for three years. His thesis, Chasing the Unwritable Book, explored how identity is shaped by mental illness and the fictional possibilities it presents to the author – with a particular focus on autobiographical fiction. He is a published poet, short story writer and essayist, with his chapter on Peter Kocan ‘The Urge to Write and the Urge to Kill’ featuring in Configuring Madness, an anthology released by Rodopi Press, Oxford, last year. After graduation he relocated to Shillong, India, where he has been working on his first novel, “Slouching Towards Petersham.”
Schadenfreude
Back in the mid-nineties – before the plucking of nasal hair became a weekly chore – I shared a short intense friendship with Grant, who was, for a time, one of the Drama Department’s most recognisable actors. Humiliating as it is, I admit that I was the other one – although I consider myself reasonably fortunate; when undergrad life finished, so did my acting career.
I just couldn’t hack it. Finding an agent, turning up for castings and waiting by the phone; it all left me feeling like a beggar. And the nerves made me come across as arrogant and desperate, an undesirable combination for any potential director keen on hiring me. The last gig I had – actually, the only paying gig of my career – was as an extra in a Telstra commercial. I had to walk across a busy street in a group-shot for four hours, trying to look solemn. Ridiculously, I hoped that the producer would note my seriousness – surely more heartfelt than any of the other extras – and discover me. When the costs of the Salvos suit I purchased especially for the shoot were coupled with my train fare to Town Hall and deducted from my $120 fee, I was left with 80 bucks. Averaged over the nine months that I tried to go professional that equals $8.88 per month, or $2.20 a week. If you take out the money I spent going for the other two auditions that I blew – both of them for roles where they needed a tall guy – then we’re down to about 60 bucks, or $1.60 a week. Between that and the bullshit I got from Centrelink, it was better for everyone if I just got a job.
Ensconced in my role as a night-packer at Coles, I ran into Grant one afternoon at Burwood station when I was on my way home from the TAB. We embraced.
Man, how are ya?
How am I? What about you? You crazy fucker.
By that he meant that the last time he saw me at The Northern Star I’d been on acid. He turned to the girl he was with.
You know, like those people you meet and you think you’ll never see them again? He’s one of those guys.
I was a little embarrassed; my white polo shirt didn’t smell great and I hadn’t shaved in a few days. I was also slightly drunk. The girl Grant was with stepped forward and tried to smile, but couldn’t quite pull it off.
When I asked Grant what he’d been up to he said that he’d gotten into NIDA.
Awesome, I said – thinking bastard, arsehole and fuck, fuck, fuck, why not me?
I tried to make my exit as soon as possible, citing my non-existent controlling girlfriend, but he was having none of it.
You’re coming back to our place, man.
At Uni we had both advocated the pursuit of fame and we respected each other for being up front about it, as opposed to our acquaintances who would go on protests with the Wilderness Society, deplore the use of deodorant and spurn anything mainstream, but who all formed grunge bands with the unvoiced desire of becoming groupie-shagging, heroin-snorting, rock gods.
As we walked along I peppered him with questions about the acting course at NIDA, which was painful but preferable to talking about what I was doing, which at the time involved a lot of masturbation about the middle-aged boilers I was working with, the softening of my belly and the little gambling habit that I had acquired.
She was the one who broke the spell.
So, Peter, what do you do?
With Grant, I could’ve told the truth. But the look on her face – and the fact that she had casually mentioned she was at NIDA with him – made me lie.
I write, I said.
What bullshit. The last thing I’d written was a final essay to complete the BA, a 3000 word puff piece on Lee Strasberg and Method Acting.
Really? she said. Have you had anything published?
Not yet.
Well, at least that was true.
I hated her immediately and she didn’t even think enough of me for that. Back at their digs – a standard two room flat with a PULP FICTION poster, a bong, a bean-bag and a PlayStation – I had to struggle with the cup of tea she made. I asked for a strong one with two sugars; she gave me a milky brew with none.
Grant didn’t notice. All he talked was NIDA, NIDA, NIDA. After the right amount of time and one forced cough from the girl – whose name is deliberately and spitefully forgotten – I bailed and forgot him for the next ten years.
·
It was Facebook that brought us back together. I’d Googled him a few times, to see if he’d made it, and the results were inconclusive. His name was listed in a few references to the Sydney Theatre Company – as a spear carrier – and one or two co-op productions, but nothing else. The scarcity of information disappointed me. If he’d snagged a regular TV spot, or had made the leap to feature films, I could have revelled in some really serious envy. Conversely, if his name had drawn a complete blank I’d have toasted his failure and patted myself on the back. The longer you keep the dream alive the thinner the ranks of the hopeful become.
But there he was in his profile pic, lying on a bed with a baby asleep next to him. Now there was some reality. A baby means responsibilities. It means regular hours, a stable home and lots of the filthy lucre. Maybe he’s given up, I thought. No, I wished.
I didn’t send the request immediately. I’d only just gotten back into it, after having deactivated my account, and this time I intended to be more circumspect with my choice of friend.
So I forgot him again and went back to watching ‘Seductive Asian pussy needs it’ on RedTube.
·
At Uni we had been involved in a few productions together. In the show I’m thinking of we saw each other daily for weeks. It was a one-acter that I directed, and Grant had volunteered to be my stage manager. Pretty soon the rumour went round that we were both gay. It’s an easy one to pin on people in the theatre; everyone is either queer or in the closet according to the smoko conversations outside the stage door.
This gossip had a bit more sting to it though, as Grant had only just been in a queer piece and played the love interest of a competitive swimmer. The role required him to get in and snog the other dude. Neither tried to dodge it; both of them went hard and gave it some tongue. It was a tricky situation for me in the audience. My then girlfriend, Max, was sitting next to me and, as well as being friends with Grant – who we were both there to support – I was acquainted with the other actor. I had cheated on Max with his girlfriend, a well known Goth Queen and devourer of cock.
So I disliked the other dude anyhow. I can’t remember his name but he was in a band that had a minor alternative hit. At the time I feared that he would come up and make a public scene in front of Max because he knew that I had clumsily fucked his girlfriend at the Bogey Hole.
But he was cool. I was the one who had the problem. When they kissed during the middle of the play I noted a distinct twitch of jealousy from my side – though I told myself then that it was the dread of getting caught cheating – and promptly forgot it.
A few months later, at the after-party for my play, we all went along to the house of the guy that had done the lights. I had scored some pot using the money we had collected from the door – even though it was a Uni production and technically all the cash was supposed to go to the Drama Department – and we all sat back and got royally stoned, except for Grant.
He doesn’t do drugs and he never touches alcohol or coffee. Don’t ask me how the motherfucker survives. Anyway, that night he came along for the ride and acted as the designated driver. Towards the end of the bowl, when the conversation had trickled down to nothing and the eyelids of the smokers had closed to half-way, I noticed Grant looking over towards me.
He caught my gaze and mouthed, Let’s go.
·
It was our first sleepover. By that stage he was going out with Max’s older sister, Lynnette, so we should have been seeing even more of each other – but the girls hated the idea. They also hated each other and had endured a fucked-up family situation, with their dad introducing them to domestic violence at an early age.
So we got back to my place in the East End, had a quick cup of tea and then went up to bed. We pulled in the single mattress from the veranda and set it up a few feet from my grimy queen-sized, so there was an acceptable buffer zone.
The talk didn’t last for long before I could feel myself dozing off. I put on some music and closed my eyes. I don’t know if it was the good buzz I had or just the routine of taking a girl back and playing some Mazzy Star, but I felt the urge to reach out the hand at that point, and briefly imagined getting it on with Grant. Yes, I’m pretty sure it moved. I’ve got no idea what he was thinking, or even if he was awake.
Then I slept.
·
A few months after I first saw him online, I relented and sent off the friend request. He accepted it straight away and posted ‘Dude!!!!’ on my wall. We arranged for him to come around and my wife, Maya, put on a great spread – rice, daal, chicken curry – with strawberries and cream for dessert.
When he turned up I went out to meet him in the hall. From my vantage point on the third floor I could see him below as he climbed the stairs. That’s when my initial suspicions were confirmed. I thought I’d detected a receding hairline in his profile pics and now, as well as that, I noticed that he’d developed a small bald patch at the back of his skull. This made me very happy. I had to start shaving my head a few years ago, and to see that Grant’s floppy brown hair had started to fall filled me with a delightful satisfaction.
We embraced.
Man, I’m so sweaty, he said. Sorry.
He was carrying a skateboard and had evidently ridden it down the hill from the train station, his Bose head phones hanging from his neck.
Grant, this is Maya.
They shook hands and then Maya went back into the bedroom to read, so we could be alone for a few minutes.
He talked about his kids and his wife.
Like, I’m already the bad guy, he said. The first thing Meg does when the kids muck-up is threaten them with Dad coming into the room.
Once you ask people about their children, forget it. He could have kept going for a long time and I had to be blunt to get him onto the topic of his career.
Are you still acting?
I’ve just finished a touring production of the schools, he said.
Yeah?
Yeah, it’s fucked. Basically it means I’m good at talking to kids about Shakespeare.
What do you do otherwise?
Oh man, you’ll never guess.
What?
I sell Christmas trees.
I laughed.
That doesn’t seem weird at all, I said. It suits you.
And it did. The last time I saw him in Newcastle, before I left for Sydney, Grant had been considering running away with the circus.
How much of the year does that take up? I asked.
Like two months, tops. We deliver the tree, set it up and then dispose of it in January.
You must meet some interesting people, said Maya, who sat down next to me.
It was the perfect thing to say, because it gave him an opportunity to do some impersonations.
I frequently hear the word disaster, he said, when I deliver to these women in the eastern suburbs. And I’m like, Love, the tsunami was a disaster, Rwanda was a disaster, your fucking Christmas tree being flat on one side is not a disaster.
He had to break off and answer the phone at that point – to take an order from a woman in the eastern suburbs who would soon be complaining about the flatness of her tree.
I reminded him of the time we’d met in Burwood, back when he’d first started at NIDA.
That’s right, he said.
What was the name of the girl you were with?
His eyes widened.
Vanessa. There’s a story about her.
Yeah?
Unless she had died I wasn’t really that interested.
Yeah. After one year she got kicked out of NIDA and she left town. Then a little while later I hear that she’s in some pilot in LA and now the show has been going for five seasons and she’s a big star.
Seriously?
Full on. Billboards on Hollywood Boulevard, the whole bit.
You should have stayed with her.
I know, man.
Does your wife act?
She used to.
·
In the car, as I drove him back home to Lewisham, he made a lot of references to the times when he’d been in Hamlet and Macbeth.
I mean, I was on the roster for two years, he said.
Despite myself, I was actually starting to feel sorry for him. Then, the revelation I’d been waiting for:
Man, he sighed, I just feel like I’m delaying the inevitable. You know? Each new job I get means that I don’t have to think about giving up for a few more months. And now there is another kid on the way, I dunno.
He trailed off.
I made some noises about how I was also finding it tough, but it wasn’t one of my more convincing performances.
He started talking about a project he was thinking of doing with a couple of mates – a TV series. He was meeting them at the pub to discuss it.
I didn’t press him for details. He was already on his way down to the canvas.
When I stopped the car, he shook my hand and smiled.
I probably won’t see you for another ten years, I said.
Fully, I know. But keep in touch, alright?
Yeah, likewise.
And congratulations, man. Your wife is awesome.
Well, she fed him, so he would say that. He didn’t have to put up with the carrot and stick dance – silent treatment and sex – which always ended with me giving in to her demands.
He closed the door, turned away and then stopped as if he’d just remembered something. He leaned back through the window and looked me in the eyes.
Peter, he said. Good luck, man.
·
You know what? The bastard meant it. Almost like we were on shore-leave in the middle of a war, and neither expected the other to survive beyond the next few weeks. That whole afternoon he hadn’t asked much about what I’d been doing, but he got enough to know that I hadn’t given up and that I intended to go the distance.
Meanwhile, as I drove away, I realised that he’d have a much better rebirth than me. You see, I was happy that he had kids and no money. I drew strength from the fact that he was a failing actor losing his hair, that he had almost packed it in and that he had to deliver Christmas trees every December. It meant I had won.
Then, as I indicated and took the Neutral Bay Exit, this thought occurred to me: I will never forget him.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Trans-Pacific writer and photographer Alex Kuo’s most recent books are White Jade and Other Stories, and Panda Diaries. His Lipstick and Other Stories won the American Book Award, and recently he received received the Alumni Achievement award from Knox College.
Bitter Melons
for PK Leung
Sixty years ago this was my universe where I lived and played, mostly by myself. Now I was back as an impatient and sweaty tourist from another postcolonial country some three thousand miles away bursting in air, as if I were late for a meeting, a bumpy voice recorder hitched to my waist. Despite the massive land use alterations resulting from the political reclamation and entrepreneurial ventures, actually I knew exactly where I was, headed home by a series of diagonal crossings and trespassing shortcuts. Or more correctly, where home was, in the last apartment building on that hill, there on a short street ending at the backside of the Royal Observatory where its seasonal typhoon signals were visible to every mariner in the harbor of this crown colony under King George VII, Number Ten being the severest.
Most of the old buildings had disappeared, and the vegetation as well, including the expansive banyan trees, now replaced by an occasional bauhinia bush planted to reverse the racial and political hegemony. Though I may not have known exactly who I was at that jostled moment, I knew precisely where I was in time, and I was in a hurry. Here, the Chanticleer bakery with its fresh, creamy napoleons—across the street from the Argyll Highlanders and the most-feared Royal Gurkha Rifles garrison—next the comic book and film magazine stand, both temptations on the walk home from the Immaculate Conception elementary school where I learned to tuck slide into second base, demonstrated one recess by an eager Canadian nun in flowing white habit.
Here the trek was interrupted by a residential development of infinite small houses, each with its narrow stone steps leading to doors of equally colorless homes, except for their sky-blue trim. Several men suddenly appeared, including one who looked Indian with a full turban, even when his skin was too light. They wanted to know what I was looking for, Torpedo Alley, they called their neighborhood in Chinese without smiling. But I knew better, they were fooling me, looking at the harbor some two hundred feet in elevation below us. It was clear they did not want me there, now as well as sixty years ago. So I explained that as a writer I was not balanced, I had just lost my way to the ferry terminal. The Indian or Pakistani man said he understood, since his wife was also a writer, of novels, he said, his eyes still a patch of doubt, and pointed, downhill first, then to the right.
Clutching my recorder then, I went downhill first, but once out of their sight around the next corner, I turned onto a muddy field where several pages were missing. Gone were the small houses and concrete sidewalk. Instead, sparse vegetable plots garnished the landscape from edge to edge. Two men in their thirties came up from one of them, though I knew they were really in their eighties, because as witness I could identify them, coming around every afternoon collecting metal, glass or paper they’d sell for recycling, rain or shine.
One of them pointed down to a row of garlic stems by his feet and said it was his. He directed his finger to the next row and said these fat cabbages were his friend’s. Then he said the last row of tiny, dark green bitter melons belonged to both of them, tendered most carefully, even in the wet and windy summer typhoon season, to keep them from rotting, he added at the end as I continued downhill to the ferry terminal.
By this time the men from Torpedo Alley had caught up with me and my transformational tricks in hallucination or dream. Like their security predecessors, they scolded me and escorted me to the gate, just when I was perfectly balanced on a high banyan limb. I used to live near here, some sixty years ago, I was sure of it.
Look here, at the Star Ferry terminal then, I skipped the Morning Star and the Meridian Star and waited for the Celestial Star for the crossing. In my hands the recorder clutched the words to the missing pages that I call home.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Luke Johnson’s stories have been published in HEAT, Going Down Swinging and Island. He is a PhD student at University of Technology, Sydney and has taught creative writing at University of Wollongong. He lives in Mt Keira with his wife and son.
A Near-Death Interruption
So I hanged myself. From the cherrywood bookcase in your study. Where you used a silk cravat and volumes one through to six of The complete works of William Shakespeare, I used a length of rope and three-rung aluminium stepladder. It was not a sexualised thing, mine. That is to say, I was not waxing lyrical with my piece in my hand at the time and there was no pantyhose crotch pulled down to my nostrils or soiled undergarment stuffed into the foyer of my oesophagus. No, it was just a regular morbid suicide attempt, with all of my clothes on and none of anybody else’s. Yours, you old romantic you, was slightly more playful.
Strange word this hanged, before I go any further. Strange both connotatively and syntactically. Connotatively, it insists completion of deed, success of task, it insists death, does it not? But why? I mean, that I persevered where you perished, does this somehow imply I did not hang? Of course I hanged (syntactically the word shows all the deference of a fourteen year old wielding a can of spray-paint). Believe you me I hanged. I felt the lead in my veins rushing to fill my toes, the mercury in my eyeballs swishing side to side like the water inside two precariously-placed fishbowls. Hey, not only did I hang, but I also swung (swing, now there is a teenager who knows how to conjugate respectfully). I swung and hanged as you must have swung and hanged, without rhythm and without breath. Like a starfish. Back and diagonal. Forthways and sideways. A real swinger and hanger, me. A real chip off the old echinodermic block.
After cutting me down, hanged though defiantly alive, they rushed me to A&E, where a white-haired doctor was impatient and cold-handed and an auburn-haired nurse played pretty and flirtatious. Not flirtatious with me so much, I was in no state to reciprocate her winks and pouts anyway, but with the ambulance driver who had brought me in certainly. The two of them waited for the doctor to finish his examination, then together they lifted me off the ambulance gurney and onto another bed with wheels. ‘He must have pissed himself after he passed out,’ the debonair driver whispered intimately while she his silver-time-piece-chested lover took count of my pulse and wiggled her button nose. Oh it was sweet being at the centre of their lovesick innuendos, and I must say, father, the smell of my soiled woollen trousers did not embarrass or cause me any special concern, not after seeing what you did to the back seat of those fishnet stockings, you old dog.
After only a short period of lying around like this mother arrived at the hospital. You remember mother, right?
‘You tried to hang yourself?!’ Part question, part exclamation. As difficult to separate as the Catholicism and Spanishness. If forced I should guess the exclamation portion of it belonged mostly to tried and Spain, and the question portion mostly to Jesus and hang.
‘Is that what they have told you?’ I replied coolly. This, after all, was a public hospital in Taunton, father, and no place for me to be acting all sulky now, not in front of such noble creatures as this nurse and her driver, working on a pittance as I am sure they were. ‘Well, okay, if that is what they have told you then. Did they mention the bit about me pissing myself also?’ I could see the hurt in mother’s eyes and wanted to let the ink run. Oh, the magnificent blueness of it.
‘Is this the kind of boy I have raised?’ she responded quietly, putting her hands to her chest to fondle that cleavage-stricken Christ of hers as she was prone to doing in times of distress, like some clean-necked virgin fending off a house of vampires with nothing but her clever little talisman. ‘The kind who would try such a thing as this? To hang himself? Hang himself!’ With the second hang she turned away from me and tugged down on the Christ with such force its silver chain could only sharpen the briefest line across the back of her neck before snapping clean in half. For a moment I though she might have been weeping. Then she swung back to face me, still clutching in her tight little fist that miniature figure who would not have looked out of place between the letters S and U. ‘Not to mention poor Marcella. Tell me you are not so selfish you would attempt such a thing.’
I was impervious. ‘Must we go on about Marcella?’ I yawned. ‘The woman really should start knocking before entering a room. The sound of a knot tightening around a neck must ring in her ears like some kind of high-pitched dog whistle.’
Mother moved to slap me but stopped herself. ‘You would mock your father like this?’ she scolded beneath her breath. ‘Talking about his accident like some funny joke. In front of any-old person.’
‘Yes, father’s accident.’ I looked past mother and at the nurse, who in turn looked past me and at the driver. She may have even winked to him: code of course, for, How about a handjob in the janitor’s, my love? The two of them left the room hurriedly then and it was just mother and I. Allowing the sarcasm to inflect my voice with its nasally undertones and offbeat emphases, I continued. ‘That accidental morning in accidental August. What an accidental shame it was.’
This time mother’s hand connected well with my cheek, the Christ getting his own piece of the retribution too. ‘That you would even dream.’ The jolt of the slap frightened me only half as much as it frightened her, I think. You must remember, father, this is the woman who used to eroticise me into syrupy slumbers by smearing her own areolas with honey, her little Alberry and custard dumpling—just look at him suck himself to sleep! And now, thirty-seven years on, showing more concern for the fragile disposition of the cleaner than for her own lacteal kin—what heartbreak!
I touched the stung spot with the back of my hand. ‘Yes, poor Marcella and her poor sweet cleaner lady’s life. And poor father too. Poor you and poor me, while I am at it. And rest assured, mother, none of it is true.’ Lies, lies, lies. ‘They have confused me for one of the other boys on the ward. Hang myself? I was only trying to gratify myself sexually. I swear it. It is a Briton’s pastime. I will show you the rope burn on my penis if you do not believe me. A boy like me getting mixed up in a thing like suicide! Even when Laudie left me, even then I did not contemplate putting a noose around my neck for the purpose of killing myself. Not to mention death being the most thorough talent scout there is, mother. If I had shown potential for a thing like suicide, then believe you me, death would have sniffed me out at a very early age, set me up for life, scholarship and all. No this is just a case of pushing the boundaries of perversion too far. The apple and the tree and all that proximity talk. Oh, please do apologise to Marcella for me. What a dreadful mix-up.’
Mother looked at me, studied me. And then she huffed. And then she left the room. And smiling, I went to sleep.
An hour or so later I awakened to find in mother’s place a woman whose makeup promised to outlast her face, whose foundation alone seemed heavy enough to negatively preserve her features for at least another three hundred years, to a time when Western Europe’s frescos will be dissolved into camera-flash oblivion and the gothic clocks of Bavaria cried for like the felled trees of fictitious Amazonia. And in place of my woollen trousers, father, complementing the shift from mother’s moody toddler to psychiatrist’s prized patient quite well, I think, a sort of plastic-legged skirt with these built-in elastic-legged pantaloon thingies.
‘Your admission card says Albert,’ Tutankhamen’s lovechild insisted. I do not remember for how long we had been arguing the point. Though I do recall that at one juncture she even went so far as to show me where the name had been filled in: Albert Dean Childes, silent s and all.
‘It is an error,’ I explained to her.
‘Not according to your mother, Albert.’
‘According to my mother my uncle is the rightful king of Denmark. Who are you going to believe?’
‘Do you think this kind of talk impresses me, Albert?’
‘Hamlet,’ I corrected her. She said nothing. I went on. ‘No, I do not suppose so. Would you be more impressed if I told you the real king of Denmark wore ladies’ stockings and used lipstick in place of Vaseline?’
She stood up and moved her chair slightly closer to me. Or perhaps she did not move it any closer at all, but rather just stood up and sat down again to give the impression of having moved closer. Either way, I found myself near enough to identify each swamped hair follicle now. Her eyelashes looked like they had endured the most recent Exxon disaster. Her upper lip was a Puerto Rican mudslide.
‘I know all about what happened to your father, Albert.’ She seemed to be whispering at me.
‘You like to remind people of their names, don’t you, doctor?’ I deepened my voice, doing my best to match her gravity.
‘Now, I never said I was a doctor, Albert. If you must know I hold an Honours degree from the University of Warwick and a Masters from Somerset.’
I frowned. Felt played. Found myself yearning for mother who wore her heart and diploma on her sleeve.
‘Albert, you are not expected to be unmoved by what happened to your father.’ She put her hand on the bed, next to my shoulder, to assure me some. She seemed to know you so well, father, know all of your moves. What if she had leaned forward next and rubbed her cleanly-shaven chin against my forehead, to kiss me good night? Would I have begun sucking my thumb and wet myself a third time?
‘Unmoved, why of course not,’ I said to her. And to some degree, meant it too. It was after all quite a shock to us, father, to learn of the promiscuous double life you had invented for yourself. When we found you, the tip of your penis was squeezed out through the top end of your fist like a tongue between two pursed lips, and the pearly sequins on the fronts of your stiletto heels shone up at us like droplets of you-know-what. And whatever shade of lipstick that was, smeared around the edges of that makeshift orifice, well, mother has refrained from restocking her supply—from wearing lipstick altogether in fact. The poor woman, since your death her lips have taken the semblance of a pair of mating slugs just doused in salt. You know what else, father? I cannot help but wonder whether the whole scene was not staged for mother’s benefit in the first place, aimed at notifying her of some sexual underperformance on her part. That you went so far as to make a face of your fist. Nothing subtle about that. Tell me I am not on to something.
‘It must have been very distressing. Your mother tells me it was your aunt who discovered him.’
‘It is an affectation,’ I said to the Master of Psychology graduate with her hand upon the mattress beside my left shoulder. ‘Marcella is not really my aunt. Just a cleaner.’
‘She seems to care for you a great deal. She was here earlier while you were sleeping.’
‘Did she try to tip anything in my ear? That is how she did father, you know? She has been with us a very long time, but is completely untrustworthy.’
‘Your mother tells me you were homeschooled, Albert.’
I nodded. Silently. I did not dare speak in fear of divulging information on the chivalrous suicide vow I had made to an already-spoken-for Beatrice during our grade-three reading of La Vita Nova, father. Sure evidence of my long-term psychological state.
Continuing unprompted, ‘Your father was in charge of your education? Or your mother?’
‘My father taught me the humanities and sciences, and my mother the guidelines for a healthy soul. Neither was in charge. A person’s education is his own charge.’ I was churning it out now.
‘And your father was a professor too. At Somerset. I remember him from one of my own classes, would you believe?’
‘Some kind of professor, yes.’
‘A very clever man.’
‘With an ear for trouble.’
‘Hmm,’ she said. Then, ‘I would like permission to speak with your wife, Albert.’
‘My wife is deceased,’ I told my interrogator.
‘That is not what your mother has told me.’
‘My mother was in charge of discipline, if that is what you mean by in charge. Though she was a forgiving disciplinarian. If father sent me to her for corporal punishment, then she would close the door and beat on a cushion and I would moan in time with each stroke. She stopped smearing honey on her teats when I was two.’
‘We are talking about your wife now, Albert.’
‘Is it important?’
‘Very.’
‘Yes, poor Laudie,’ I said. ‘She drowned in a terrible house fire, you know. It makes me too sad to mention. Sorry I cannot be of more help. I have long suspected her brother of foul play. A chap with washboard abdominals.’
She gave me a stern smile. Her nose might have fallen to ruins along with a swag of other famous decayed noses, led of course by the Sphinx (the answer is man! I thought to yell). ‘Okay, Albert, I will visit you again later this evening. We must talk seriously before I can allow you to leave. It is necessary for my report. You see me carrying my reports, don’t you?’
‘I see nothing I am not supposed to see.’
But that was not entirely true either, father. From my bed beside the window I could see the advertisement for the cheap carpet warehouse pasted on the back of the bus shelter down below. Some stand-in with a cartoonish face who had been paid to put on a pair of tights and pose himself in a manner befitting the tagline To carpet or not to carpet? That is the question. You will agree, father, it is a disgrace the way they exploit the classics like that.