May 5, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Michelle Murray explores identity and the space where her Scottish/Australian heritage merges with the land and culture of the Simpson Desert Channel Country . After acting college Michelle packed a swag and a bag to live on the edge of the desert with her husband who is descended from the Arabana people. They lived together on Wangkamadla (Bedourie) and Wangkangurru/Yarluyandi (Birdsville) country before moving to rural South Australia where Michelle has an Alexandrina Council artist residency at Goolwa. Michelle is an independent writer/performer. ‘Skeleton Woman’ was originally produced for Onkaparinga Council’s Double Vision art exhibition in October 2011.
The Skeleton Woman
Here my body lies, shallow beneath this silken sheet; a skeleton, a wreck, a place for sharks and waves. This thin veil shows my bones, exposes me for my loss of souls. How I yearn to stay submerged. Who could want for a dearth of flesh? Please me. Lay down with me. Sink your spirit into my cavities. Oh, what pleasures we had. This sunken whore who gave of herself so freely now breaks up and splinters; no thought of my own majesty. I dreamed of waves crashing men against rocks and sucking them out to sea. I heard the screams, chased them down the hill; joined the others in their horrible vigil. She took so very long to drown them, to dash them into final silence; those poor men, consignments: bags of wheat and salted meat; help arriving for too few, dragged to comfortable deaths in beds. I waited and waited for your body to emerge to carry you home.
All souls conjure the dead, make me whole again.
***
Remember the day you came?
‘Gidday,’ you said. ‘There’s somewhere here you want a windmill to stand?’ I took you to the top, you looked about, saw foothills falling into a river cliff, the far off swamp, the distant sea, the village below our feet forgotten in the rush toward prosperity. ‘I had no idea this place existed,’ you said.
I’d lay beside the trough breathing the smell of horse sweat, feeling the dirt curved beneath my feet, looking up into the sky with you drilling and me diving into that cosmic ocean, your voice in the windmill’s rusty turning. You would sing out that you could see the church steeple, you could see the ocean liners, you could see that sleepy river snaking her way past the Noarlungas.
‘Enough water for one fine lady thank you Lord, and a bit more for a cup of tea!’
And that was about all we got but not for the want of pumping. But the water didn’t matter, not to me. It was the drilling, the building and sweetest of all, you returning. Adjust a little here, realign there, cups of tea, horse hair, you and me, the river snaking through the valley, the church steeple, the ships waiting, conversation, your gentle mouth, my mother hosting dementia in the house, the clatter and bang of the windmill sucking air and dust and lust.
But it has been so long since I heard your voice, saw your face. Work took you so far away.
‘To be the pelican,’ you would say. ‘Inland lakes, that’d be the way! Erecting windmills, drilling bores, then all the way back to catch fish in the ocean, and you.’
No talk of the wife and kids. Sacred, you’d say. That promise to a dead man to never abandon them. And now you’re gone. That’s what they say. You will never return. I will never see your face. In the shallows of the cove the wreck of The Star of Greece still moans, the ground is hard under my bum, the windmill stands as it has done all this time. Nothing has changed. You are still away. I wait for your return. What else can be done?
***
You are everywhere: cats over fences, reflecting back in mirrors. I slept with a man who might have been you, his shoulders, his flat palette hands. It’s brutal.
***
From a tree in the gully
I hung upside down
The earth the moon
The branch the ground
My brother threw peaches
Dreaming of war
That made him a man
Who never came home
At the tree today in my search for him
I found all the men of my life
Missing
***
At the church on the hill my sins called my name. The minister said that you were found by the governess hanging from a windmill. From a distance it seemed to her eyes that an oblong fruit hung ripening on a tree without roots. Did you cry out? Did you rage that you stepped over that edge? How is it that fate, or misfortune – or worse – left you hanging between sky and earth?
***
I went all the way to the city to see the flowers at the cemetery, to watch the mourners, your family. I saw your wife clutch a man like you; her children stumbled at the grave. I waited a long time to see the backhoe fill you in. Did she hold you? Did she kiss your cold face? I would have stayed but for the train. If I missed it I would have missed the last bus and while I could spend the night on your freshly turned clod I couldn’t be sure of the company you keep. I’ve never known you but the two of us, a horse trough, the hill into the valley and the distant sea. And it’s funny, you know, because I got the feeling when the sun went down that even you didn’t hang around.
***
I found you flying on updrafts seeing way beyond the ships at sea and into the desert channel country. You told me to fly with you inland and make babies. I ran to the updraft, I reached for you tasting you on my tongue – snot and blood and semen. Jesus, where did that come from? When I woke – a rock in my back, the sun hot on my face – I got up and threw stones at those pelicans looking down at me. Such bloody piety.
***
I love your injuries, you would say to me, I crave your cavities, but it’s true isn’t it, that we three are bottles in your collection of miseries. The wife who grieved in your arms, children at her feet, the comfort you gave, the husband you made. The governess you took on the search: every plane, helicopter, car employed. You found him broken inside his chopper – his swag, his bag, her picture – of course you were there for her. And me. What did you see? A wretch trapped in a house of stale bread and boiled meat, a nutcase mother peeing in her bed. I found my legitimacy in you, surely. But of us, why so many?
***
A woman came. We never paid for the windmill.
‘It’ll have to come down,’ she said. ‘I’ll send a man.’ She reached out and touched your welds. ‘Money’s hard to come by these days,’ she said. ‘I wish it wasn’t this way.’ I stroked her cheek. She slapped my face. ‘Where do you get off?’ she spat.
I started to undress. My clothes dropped. Her face froze. My ugly bits exposed. I stared out to sea. I thought of all those sailors dashed on the rocks and their families.
‘We made love right here,’ I said, ‘again and again,’ since she thought she knew everything. She stared at the spot until something snapped. She raged back to her car but came back. She’d dropped her keys.
‘Put your bloody clothes back on,’ she said. She went through everything back and forth from the car; turned her bag inside out. The day started to deteriorate. She was crying I could see. ‘Oh, the humility,’ she kept saying and then she said, ‘oh the pain’. She threw stones at the windmill. ‘Why?’ she kept asking. I don’t know if it was why you slept with me or why you died. She cried and cried. I went to the house to check my mother. When I got back your wife was crumpled by the trough scratching the dry inside with a rock. I climbed in and she followed. She said you were a good lover, a good provider. She said you could never replace her first husband. She told you that. ‘I told him that,’ she said looking now at me. ‘What was I thinking?’ We sat quiet for a long time. ‘There’s another one,’ she said, ‘the one who found him. I want to hate her but it won’t come. All I can think is that poor woman. Then I wish it was me, not her. Then I’m glad it’s not my burden to bear. You’re the lucky one,’ she said. We drank from her bottle of gin.
‘What about your kids.’ I asked.
‘Oh, they’ll be fine,’ she said.
I was sure I could hear mum. She was drinking fast, your wife.
‘I really have to go, my mother,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ she said. We stood in the trough with no water.
At the house she watched me wipe my mother’s arse, make porridge and the old woman flick it all about. I made tea but she was happy with her gin. When she nearly fell over I steered her to my bedroom. She fell on the bed and complained the room was spinning. I left a bucket, wrestled the blankets; she snored and vomited. In the morning she sat with coffee at the end of my bed. I woke with her looking at me like an eagle surveying the dead.
‘I could like you,’ she said. Sober I suppose or at least with a hangover she leaned over and kissed me long on the lips. ‘I thought I was carrying this all myself but it’s not true is it?’ When she got up to leave she turned back. ‘I’ll still have to take the windmill. Sorry about that.’
***
We decided you were either an angel or an arsehole, a lover or a fraud. You dropped blessings into our cups then dropped off the face of the earth. We laughed hysterically into our glasses then cried at separate times. When one cried the other thought she a thief stealing memories. We hated each other passionately. She told me I don’t have a single interesting thought in my head so I must be good in bed.
‘You live in a disgusting mess,’ she said
‘I am a disgusting mess,’ I told her. ‘You should appreciate my transparency.’ She agreed, poured another one and we started all over again exchanging insults, doing our best to bruise each other, promising that we would not let the other go numb, promising that we’d still feel the pain then one day she didn’t come. A week went by. I got to thinking about you again, the windmill gone – nothing to focus on. I went to the ocean, took lavender and frankincense, poured the essence into the water, thought of sailors and lovers, sharks and blood, and her, thought of shipwrecks submerged and then I knew an entire world lived inside of you. A story I don’t know. Even so, like so many men, you took it to the grave: the unspeakable, the unfathomable, buried shallow, unreachable.
***
I got a letter from the governess the other day:
Just to say he spoke about you. I’m sorry I have nothing to say except the last thing he said to me was we will all understand one day. I lived like a skeleton woman, no flesh on my bones. I was certain no man would touch me but one did eventually come along. I hope you’re not alone. I read in the paper about water near your home. How a town was drowned, that the people can still be found sitting at the table ready to eat their meal; roads, bus stops, playgrounds but I doubt it’s real. When I think of it I think of you. I dreamed that you were washed out to sea, the dam wall broken dragging you out into water so deep I thought for sure you would never be retrieved, but on a beach my daughter picked up a pelican feather and I knew that one day you would find me and we would be sisters.
***
It’s been a long time now, my mother finally dead but not until she was utterly dependent. At the end she spoke of the beginning, she spoke of her childhood as she spoke of giving birth. She spoke to my brother, reaching out her hand and when the time came she spoke of pain. Then I really was alone. I put the place on the market. A run-down house built with no particular thought on land devoid of permanent water is worth a lot it turns out. I’m going to travel to all the places you spoke of and when I’m done I will travel beyond any place I have ever imagined. I hope one day that the wailing creaking cries of the sailors and the sunken woman bereft beneath the waves diminishes, that I will be fleshed out, that new life will spring from me and all of this will become a memory.
Goodnight my lovely.
May 5, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Prasanta Das is Professor of English at Tezpur University in the northeast Indian state of Assam. He was born in Shillong, Meghalaya where his mother still lives. He is a two time Fulbrighter (Cornell and Harvard) and his poems and short stories have appeared in Kunapipi, Indian PEN, New Quest, and Out of Print.
Mr Deb’s Shop
“You must go to the cremation,” my mother said. But I had already made up my mind to go. Mr Deb had been my father’s friend and our neighbour for years. For as long as I could remember he had owned a small shop in Police Bazaar in a lane that was a couple of minutes walk from where the newsagents had their stalls. My father had always gone to Mr Deb’s shop when my brother or I needed a new pen or my mother wanted her brand of hair oil. As a small boy, I often accompanied my father on these trips. Sometimes our whole family would go to Police Bazaar. My father and mother would sit on little stools in Mr Deb’s shop, talking and laughing. Mr Deb would order tea and, when the boy brought it, he would emerge from behind the counter to courteously serve it himself. Later when I became older I was sometimes sent to do the shopping but I never went to Mr Deb’s shop. I preferred the bigger ones.
I was in Hyderabad when my father had died suddenly one afternoon at our home in Shillong. Mr Deb had got myHyderabadaddress from someone. He had broken the news to me gently, speaking with genuine feeling. I managed to reach Kolkata in the evening. But there wasn’t a flight to Guwahati until the next afternoon. The cremation was over by the time I reached home. Now, less than a year later, Mr Deb himself was dead. Attending his funeral would be a little like attending my father’s funeral.
Mr Deb became our neighbour when he bought a house near ours. This was after the hill state movement when Meghalaya was created and most Assamese families were selling their houses in Shillong to move to Guwahati. It was a difficult time for my parents since so many of their friends were leaving. In the end, they decided to stay. This was a great relief to my brother and me. We boys loved Shillong and could not imagine a life elsewhere.
There was the usual bickering over a boundary wall and for a couple of years relations between Mr Deb’s family and ours became quite strained. But after my father’s death I began to seek out Mr Deb’s company. It was then that I noticed how frequently he was away from Shillong. When I asked him about his absences, he told me he was building a second house in Silchar. Mr Deb had gone one more time to supervise the building of the house. But this time he had had a heart attack in the bus itself.
They had brought Mr Deb’s body home a little beforenoon. The driver and the conductor of the bus had stood around for a while and then quietly disappeared. In the cramped drawing room, Mr Vaswani, a couple of his tenants, and a Bengali gentleman who worked in the Account General’s Office sat on the cane chairs. I sat on the bed that was pushed up against the wall. Babu, Mr Deb’s son, was much younger than me. He had graduated recently from college. I often saw him in the evenings in Police Bazaar with a group of young men who idled away their time near Mr Deb’s shop. He was a rather quiet young man and now the shock of losing his father had further subdued him.
Mrs Deb entered. A fragrant smell of incense seemed to come from her. Her thin gray hair was loose and hung on her shoulder. She was the kind of woman who rarely left her home. I had expected her to scream and wail but she was almost composed as she received our condolences. “I told Babu’s father not to go”, she said to us. “I told him you are an old man now. But he would not listen.” We did not say anything. But all of us knew why Mr Deb had been building a second house in Silchar. The recent communal troubles in Shillong, the resentment against “outsiders” like us had made him nervous. A former refugee fromEast Pakistan, he wanted Babu to have a secure home. Though Mr Deb had never actually said so to anyone, it was clear that he was planning to sell off his house and shop in Shillong and move to Silchar. Mr Deb did not want Babu to go through the uncertainties he himself had faced when he had come to Shillong as a young man soon afterIndependenceand Partition.
From my place on the bed, I got a glimpse of the next room. I could see a broken harmonium placed on top of a wooden almirah. I wondered if the broken harmonium had belonged to Mr Deb and when he had played it. The house was now beginning to fill up with relatives, friends and other neighbors. Assured that my absence would not be noticed, I left.
I sat on the verandah of our house watching the mourners walk down the sloping road to Mr Deb’s shop. Aged men, some in tweed coats, others in home-knitted sweaters, and their wives were coming from Laban, Rilbong,Jail Roadand other places. As they went past, I heard them talking about Mr Deb in the Bengali they had brought with them forty years ago from their towns and villages in Sylhet. The tin-roofed, wooden-floored houses of my father’s generation needed looking after but Mr Deb’s house had not been painted in years. The roof was dark with rust. The house usually wore a dull, enclosed look because you rarely saw it with its doors and windows open. Today its owner’s death had given it a kind of life.
I sat on the verandah for several hours. When I heard the sound of bamboo being cut I knew they were making the bier and that it would not be long before they carried the body past our house.
I joined the procession when it reached our house. There were nearly fifty men, both young and elderly, in the procession. I recognized a few shopkeepers from Police Bazaar, Polo Ground and theJail Roadarea. The young men were mostly Babu’s friends.
It was the first time I was seeing the Mawlai cremation ground. Babu’s friends had lost their evening indolence and were full of energy. Some of them went off to the cottages nearby to buy firewood while the men gathered in small groups. I chose a spot at the edge of the ground and sat down to watch the preparations for the cremation. Mr Vaswani, noticing me sitting alone, came over and began to make conversation. He was a tall man of great bulk, a little stooped now because of his age. “Philosopher!” he jokingly chided me. Then he lit a cigarette and became serious. “That boy was here a few days back,” he said, pointing to one of Babu’s friends who was arranging the funeral pyre. “An uncle of his died. He knows what to do.”
It was a shock to see Mr Deb lying naked on the pyre. I remembered how, before he became our neighbor, my brother and I were so used to seeing Mr Deb behind the counter that he looked a little strange to us whenever we saw him whole – as on those occasions when he served tea to our parents.
“At Police Bazaar point,” Mr Deb had replied when I asked him where he had first met my father. My father was living alone in Shillong then. It was the period in his life when he was still sending his salary home to his brother. He had married recently but my mother was at her parents’ house in the village. My father had got into the habit of walking over to Police Bazaar in the evenings after his work at the State Secretariat was over. He would buy a copy of the Assam Tribune and stand reading it near Police Bazaar point. He and Mr Deb had met each other then. After this my father’s evening routine had varied a little. He would go to Mr Deb’s shop to read his paper and chat for a while before going back to his rented house. I could easily picture my father at this time in his life because at home there were a few photographs of him from his early days in Shillong. They revealed a dapper man, handsome despite a receding hairline. When as boys my brother and I had first come across these photographs, it was something of a wonder to us that our father had dressed in nice-looking suits and worn well-chosen ties in the past. But we also thought this was a thing a man usually did when he was young, just as a young man usually had more hair.
In the shop, Mr Deb and my father often talked of owning their own houses. Owning a house was a priority for them as for those of their generation who had left their homes to settle in Shillong. During the early years of his employment my father saved all he could to buy a suitable plot of land. His parents had died when he was small. He had brothers and sisters but how many I do not know because my brother and I never saw them. We did not visit them nor did they ever visit us. When we were children we were taken once a year to visit our maternal grandparents. But we never went to our father’s village. Later on, I came to know that my father had some land of his own. This was his share of the family property. My mother often complained that his brothers had sold off my father’s land. But I sometimes wondered who had taken the responsibility of educating my father. After all, it was this education that had made it possible for him to leave home and find employment in Shillong.
I decided that it must have been my father’s eldest brother who educated him since on the eldest son would fall such parental obligations. After he had graduated, my father was able to get a job as a government clerk in Shillong. And at some point after he had come to Shillong, my father had stopped sending money home. When my father stopped parting with his salary, his eldest brother would have felt justified in selling off my father’s share of the family land. I think my father accepted this as right and fair because I never heard him express any regret or bitterness.
My father did not like to talk of his earlier life because he had started life anew in Shillong and wanted to forget the past. But Mr Deb enjoyed talking of his past. He had arrived in Shillong as an almost penniless refugee and he had many dramatic stories to tell. As a boy, I envied him his connection with history. He was a small man, an ordinary man. Yet he a connection with history. My father had no such stories to tell. So I clung to something that my mother once told us brothers – that my father’s graduation had been delayed by a year or two because of his participation in the Quit India movement. There was another story my mother used to tell us: when my father graduated, he had become an object of curiosity in his village. This story used to me smile. It was only after he died that I realized that my father too had broken with the past. He too had taken his life in his own hands.
There was a breeze blowing and Mr Deb’s son was shivering a little in his dhoti. Sorrow had given him a chastened look. But he had composed himself and now, like a sincere schoolboy, he was following the directions of the priest. I wondered what he would do with the shop. In his own way, Mr Deb had made something of his life. Babu had received an ordinary education because unlike my father, who had sent my brother and me to the best school in Shillong, Mr Deb did not have much faith in education. He admired our school uniforms but entirely without envy. “Kalita Babu,” I heard him say to my father once, “quite a bit of your income must be going in paying the children’s fees”. My father had laughed, pleased.
The young men were prodding Mr Deb’s body with bamboo poles to make it burn well. They were arguing about wind direction and the placement of wood. Mr Deb’s body had lost its human softness and had become a charred object. Soon it would turn into ashes.
Two weeks after I had attended Mr Deb’s funeral, I took a taxi to Police Bazaar. It dropped me near the tourist taxi stand, where the touts accosted me shouting, “Guwahati! Guwahati!” I walked past Police Bazaar point, past the spot where the newsstands used to be, past the pharmacies, past Bijou cinema till I came to the lane where Mr Deb had his shop. It was open. Babu was standing behind the counter, talking to one of his friends, who was busy installing a photocopier. “It’s second hand,” Babu said to me. “But it’s in good condition.”
He invited me to sit. We talked. “Mr Vaswani came,” Babu said quietly. “He asked me if I wanted to sell the shop. I said no.” I nodded. “My father, my father…” Babu began. Then tears welled up in his eyes and his voice choked. I looked away. When he recovered we talked of other things.
On the way back home, instead of taking a taxi, I decided to walk. As I crossed the road at Police Bazaar point, near the place where my father had met Mr Deb all those years ago, I thought about Babu’s decision to drop his father’s plan of shifting to Silchar. It seemed like an act of disobedience. But I knew it wasn’t. Babu was staying on because he did not think his father’s life had been a mistake.
April 26, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Hoa Pham is an author and playwright. Her play “silence” was on the VCE Drama Studies list in Victoria in 2010 and published by Currency Press. Her work can be viewed at www.hoapham.net
Wave
Inside it was warm like greenhouse flowers. Outside it was the end of the world.
*
He was waiting. Waiting for his mother to come. In his favourite yellow hat with the cosy ear flaps on and wrapped up in his red puffy parka. In his gumboots with buzzy bees.
They had just had open play time when they could do anything they liked. He made a picture for his mother out of autumn leaves. The brown foliage crunched in his hands and littered the paper with broken remains.
Usually mummy was punctual. She would arrive and take her hand in his and give him a kiss on the cheek. She smelt of perfume and newly applied lipstick. Then they would go home and have a hot chocolate while she cooked dinner.
He hoped she would come soon so he could give her his collage of leaves. He had made a giraffe and a horse.
*
Her powdered face was a fraud, a mask to the outside world. Sometimes she thinks the mask is transparent and people can see straight through to her soul. Only her lover has seen her wake up in the early morning- her husband leaves for work by the time she rises at home.
She did not know what her lover saw in her. She was married and worn down like a river stone. Having borne two children she was plumper than she should be. She was respectable, not the kind to have extra marital affairs. Romance and longing were for other people, not for someone ordinary like her.
Only their shared secrets made her feel alive anymore. Her husband was amiable enough, good looking enough, stable enough. But something was awry with their family set, husband and wife, son and daughter.
*
Outside was the distant roar of the ocean. Today he could hear the waves. It sounded like the beach had crept right up to their doorstep.
Next to him the other children were waiting too. No one’s parents had arrived yet.
He was looking at the clock.
Soon they were all looking at the clock waiting for their parents to come.
The red digital numbers on the stark black clock told no lies.
Their parents were late.
*
He found himself thinking of his sister. She had been crying a lot in her room. She did not cry when their parents were home, lately she had been stiff of face. But when neither of them were there and she was supposed to look after him, she would retreat into her room and cry. He would sit in front of her sliding bedroom door and wait for her to come out for a cuddle.
His sister was beautiful, with cherubic short hair. She used to go to her friend’s apartment a lot, but that stopped when the crying began. He missed his sister smiling and talking to him.
He looked back at the closed door to the children’s room. No one’s parents had arrived. That was strange. Sometimes one parent would be late. But all of them?
The children began whispering amongst themselves.
One child began to cry, snuffling softly.
*
They breathe heavily, and fly at each others’ touch. Her back arcs as she feels the sensation of flying. Her lover’s fingers caress the petals of her inner self. She brushes her hands over her nipples for the fleeting sharp sensation. Then it is her lover’s turn, and they sigh together, moisture mingling. From their union, a pearl is birthed from her throat. Her lover plucks the sweet gem from her mouth with her fingers. Slippery and wet the multi coloured rainbow goes into her mouth and she swallows. They know that if anyone finds out about the gems they birth, they would no longer have the pleasure to themselves.
This is her memory- a reconstruction as she surges forward on her fingers remembering how to feel. Her lover is gone now over the seas, exiled far away from all that is familiar.
I still love you. Even though they have separated us. I will never forget you. Even though they have forced this marriage on me, I have learnt how to separate body and spirit.
Everything is a construction.
*
Mother! He thinks into the ether, hoping that she can hear him shouting in his mind. Sometimes she does know, the hiccup before he cries out aloud that brings her running into his room. Other times she is deaf to him even when he is in her arms, warm and snug.
Where are all the mummies? Where have they gone?
A child care worker opens the sliding door and is greeted by the silent anticipation of the children sitting in rows cross legged on the floor.
She shakes her head, and now he can see how white she is and the deepest frown on her face close up. Something is wrong.
*
She wishes she was other than what she is. Tenses turn and twist as she remembers, sometimes she remembers the here and now, other times the past as she recalls it, in the quicksilver light of her teenage years.
When she orgasms she remembers the most. Past lovers flick by like comic book frames, the neon lights of Shinjuku out of a love hotel window, the fleeting kiss of loves that never were.
She would not exchange what she is for something else, she tells herself as she sinks into the hot bath scented with pink ginger. Her skin dissolves when she is in water and the warmth penetrates her core.
When she was younger she and her first love would don costumes on Sundays and join the cosplay parading. She was slim and flat chested and would go as Dragon Girl, a warrior in pigtails that had dragons slithering down her arms. She yearned to fly like Dragon Girl and her lover would go as Dragon Boy. That way business men would not try to proposition them like they did when her lover stayed true to her gender which was the same.
Others cannot forgive that she still holds memories of her first love dearest to her heart.
*
In Zen Buddhism the circle is emptiness and completeness. In Japanese literature, a mood is captured, a fleeting feeling. It is not so important unlike Western literature, for the hero to conquer all.
*
She only began to play piano for herself once she was in Australia. There was an old upright piano in the corner of the multipurpose meeting room in the apartment complex. No one could hear her, she did not have to think about what other people thought and felt. The sound bounced on the wooden floor, and the touch was uneven. Clunky though her renditions were, she lost herself in the tangled notes of her memory.
*
He vanishes inside his mind then.
A photographer taking their pictures, a flash of light over the children sitting in rows like temple statues. Then a red headed white woman speaking a foreign language gives them soft toys.
He balances the brown soft toy kangaroo on his crossed legs. Outside older children are playing.
He remembers thinking – they have not suffered. They do not know anything.
Seriousness was pressed into him that day.
I’m not like them. I cannot be carefree.
*
She has a younger brother. He is the only reason that she would not wish death on her parents. She had prayed to the old gods, the dragons of earth, water, fire and heaven.
When the dream came true she was terrified by the freedom she felt, falling into empty space.
*
He had the ever present filial obligation to look after his older beautiful sister. Even though she had abandoned their ancestors and the family shrine.
Now the soft toy kangaroo is worn from where his baby hand had clutched it every night in his foster home. One eye is missing but somehow the kangaroo yields to being squeezed in between his shirts and shoes in his suitcase.
What do you call the hopping mouse with a bag?
Kan-ga-rou.
*
Melbourne is the first place she could see the stars in the sky. She is stunned and spends nights lying on her back on the roof of the apartment complex gazing at the Southern Cross and the rabbit in the moon.
During the daytime the sky is electric blue, arcing overhead. The streets are empty. Without the mass of people to hold her in, she feels the boundaries of her self dissipate and fade.
*
She is the legal guardian of her brother, being over 18. Australians think she is younger than she is, other Asians see the creases at the corner of her eyes and backs of her hands and say she is older. Since her parents died, guilt and responsibility makes her shoulders tense and her hands ache with pain.
Her brother has retreated inside himself. She is cocooned in her own silence and shame. They live in the same apartment and eat the same brand of instant ramen together but are each alone.
*
His sister taps on the computer keyboard late into the night, early into the morning. Once he surprised her laughing quietly at the screen. She shows animation to the CGI and flat of face to her little brother. Her phone beeps melodic messages constantly.
He studies the international baccalaureate in a school uniform that is slightly too big for him. His English picks up when he is interested in doing so. Their parents legacy had already been earmarked for their education. Without being told, the siblings do what their parents would have wanted.
He watches his sister’s movements. Sometimes she stays at university overnight and doesn’t come home. He fails to say anything. Some nights he watches TV until she returns.
He becomes immersed in anime that he is familiar with in Japanese, that is dubbed into English. He is swallowed up by the characters and is taken by one androgynous lone hero, who sometimes is referred to as a girl, other times a boy. He styles his hair in the same shaggy cut and peroxides blond.
No one is around to say no to them. She starts drinking lychee liquor in cans, imported from Japan. Then moves on to vodka and cordial. Sometimes she leaves empties around for him to finish off when she isn’t looking.
*
New Years Eve. At home they would go to the shrine for luck and write their wishes on wooden tablets to hang up and blow in the breeze. Last New Years Day she was with her lover. They had bought identical pink outfits at the sales and pretended to be sisters, walking together with linked arms.
At the Inari temple they had posed for snapshots under a giant stone fox statue adorned with the red bib and wrote their dearest wishes for their love in kanji on fox shaped tablets. Ringing the bells for luck they swore to never be parted and never to forget.
This year she remembers as she throws 500 yen coins into the stone dragon fountain for luck. At her home temple she had bought an extravagant gold tablet for the spirits of her parents. This alleviates her guilt, appealing to the same celestial gods to look after them in heaven.
*
Music was her joy from when she was a toddler. She was taken to a Suzuki method concert when she was three. Little girls in white dresses played Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on the violin in unison, the youngest being two years old. Her mother asked her which instrument she would like to play and she said piano. There was only one pianist amongst the little girls, and she had always felt she was different from the rest.
Mother learnt alongside her at first, a memory that made her fingers ache in sympathy. Balancing a 500 yen coins on the back of her hands to train her hands flat and straight. Doing five variations of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and listening to the Suzuki repertoire on her mp3 player at night.
Then the recitals began, first in the guise of music camps. Guests to their home were treated to a little night music by Mozart. By then her mother had stopped shadowing her. She was eight when the competition began in earnest. She began to make up her own music, her own variations. Then one evening her mother, cooking in the next room, put down her chopping knife and walked into the room. The music jarred to a stop.
“What are you playing?”
“I’m making up a surprise for the teacher.”
“Don’t ever do that again. If you play that to the teacher how bad will I look? Concentrate on your recital.”
Her mother left her, and so did the desire.
*
Her duet partner was assigned to her. A solemn girl, taller and four months older. Their mothers met, assessing each other under the teacher’s supervision. The two girls practiced together. The boundaries between them dissolved in the melding of their tunes, and when they won their first eisteddfod.
She rediscovered joy then staying at her duet partner’s house overnight. In this house they were allowed to read past midnight. They exchanged clothing, and secrets.
They played live to a TV studio audience to showcase their teacher. It was broadcast nationally and she was showered with attention for a day.
Their families went on excursions together. Then on one trip the mothers had an argument. Her mother blushed with anger told her they were going home early.
She never saw her duet partner again. She has been looking for her double, her collaborator, her muse ever since.
*
In his sister’s shadow he bloomed from benign neglect.
*
Maybe this is why she cannot perform anymore. The last time she drank a can of coffee before she was scheduled to play. She shook and sweated all over the keys. Then she disassociated, the audience dipped out of sight and she was far away, unable to access the joy that was once hers.
Her teacher was unsympathetic. The girl was a hard worker but fell apart under pressure. Soon the lessons ceased all together.
*
She does not realise that her mother’s lies parallel hers.
He does not realise his destiny is preordained like tram tracks from the stories he emotes.
The stories between the lines and spaces on the pages.
April 26, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Zen Cho is a Malaysian writer living in London. Her fiction has been featured or is forthcoming in various publications including Strange Horizons, the Selangor Times, Fantastique Unfettered, Steam-Powered II and GigaNotoSaurus. Her short story ‘First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia’ was a finalist in the 2011 Selangor Young Talent Awards.
The Four Generations of Chang E
The First Generation
In the final days of Earth as we knew it, Chang E won the moon lottery.
For Earthlings who were neither rich nor well-connected, the lottery was the only way to get on the Lunar Habitation Programme. (This was the Earthlings’ name for it. The moon people said: “those fucking immigrants”.)
Chang E sold everything she had: the car, the family heirloom enamel hairpin collection, her external brain. Humans were so much less intelligent than Moonites anyway. The extra brain would have made little difference.
She was entitled to the hairpins. Her grandmother had pressed them into Chang E’s hands herself, her soft old hands folding over Chang E’s.
“In the future it will be dangerous to be a woman,” her grandmother had said. “Maybe even more dangerous than when my grandmother was a girl. You look after yourself, OK?”
It was not as if anyone else would. There was a row over the hairpins. Her parents had been saving them to pay for Elder Brother’s education.
Hah! Education! Who had time for education in days like these? In these times you mated young before you died young, you plucked your roses before you came down with some hideous mutation or discovered one in your child, or else you did something crazy–like go to the moon. Like survive.
Chang E could see the signs. Her parents’ eyes had started following her around hungrily, for all the world as if they were Bugs Bunny and she was a giant carrot. One night Chang E would wake up to find herself trussed up on the altar they had erected to Elder Brother.
Since the change Elder Brother had spent most of his time in his room, slumbering Kraken-like in the gloomful depths of his bed. But by the pricking of their thumbs, by the lengthening of his teeth, Mother and Father trusted that he was their way out of the last war, their guard against assault and cannibalism.
Offerings of oranges, watermelons and pink steamed rice cakes piled up around his bed. One day Chang E would join them. Everyone knew the new gods liked best the taste of the flesh of women.
So Chang E sold her last keepsake of her grandmother and pulled on her moon boots without regret.
On the moon Chang E floated free, untrammelled by the Earth’s ponderous gravity, untroubled by that sticky thing called family. In the curious glances of the moon people, in their condescension (“your Lunarish is very good!”) she was reinvented.
Away from home, you could be anything. Nobody knew who you’d been. Nobody cared.
She lived in one of the human ghettos, learnt to walk without needing the boots to tether her to the ground, married a human who chopped wood unceasingly to displace his intolerable homesickness.
One night she woke up and saw the light lying at the foot of her bed like snow on the grass. Lifting her head, she saw the weeping blue eye of home. The thought, exultant, thrilled through her: I’m free! I’m free!
The Second Generation
Her mother had had a pet moon rabbit. This was before we found out they were sentient. She’d always treated it well, said Chang E. That was the irony: how well we had treated the rabbits! How little some of them deserved it!
Though if any rabbit had ever deserved good treatment, it was her mother’s pet rabbit. When Chang E was little, it had made herbal tea for her when she was ill, and sung her nursery rhymes in its native moon rabbit tongue–little songs, simple and savage, but rather sweet. Of course Chang E wouldn’t have been able to sing them to you now. She’d forgotten.
But she was grateful to that rabbit. It had been like a second mother to her, said Chang E.
What Chang E didn’t like was the rabbits claiming to be intelligent. It’s one thing to cradle babies to your breast and sing them songs, stroking your silken paw across their foreheads. It’s another to want the vote, demand entrance to schools, move in to the best part of town and start building warrens.
When Chang E went to university there was a rabbit living in her student hall. Imagine that. A rabbit sharing their kitchen, using their plates, filling the pantry with its food.
Chang E kept her chopsticks and bowls in her bedroom, bringing them back from the kitchen every time she finished a meal. She was polite, in memory of her nanny, but it wasn’t pleasant. The entire hall smelled of rabbit food. You worried other people would smell it on you.
Chang E was tired of smelling funny. She was tired of being ugly. She was tired of not fitting in. She’d learnt Lunarish from her immigrant mother, who’d made it sound like a song in a foreign language.
Her first day at school Chang E had sat on the floor, one of three humans among twenty children learning to add and subtract. When her teacher had asked what one and two made, her hand shot up.
“Tree!” she said.
Her teacher had smiled. She’d called up a tree on the holographic display.
“This is a tree.” She called up the image of the number three. “Now, this is three.”
She made the high-pitched clicking sound in the throat which is so difficult for humans to reproduce.
“Which is it, Changey?”
“Tree,” Chang E had said stupidly. “Tree. Tree.” Like a broken down robot.
In a month her Lunarish was perfect, accentless, and she rolled her eyes at her mother’s singsong, “Chang E, you got listen or not?”
Chang E would have liked to be motherless, pastless, selfless. Why was her skin so yellow, her eyes so small, when she felt so green inside?
After she turned 16, Chang E begged the money off her dad, who was conveniently indulgent since the divorce, and went in secret for the surgery.
When she saw herself in the mirror for the first time after the operation she gasped.
Long ovoid eyes, the last word in Lunar beauty, all iris, no ugly inconvenient whites or dark browns to spoil that perfect reflective surface. The eyes took up half her face. They were like black eggs, like jewels.
Her mother screamed when she saw Chang E. Then she cried.
It was strange. Chang E had wanted this surgery with every fibre of her being–her nose hairs swooning with longing, her liver contracting with want.
Yet she would have cried too, seeing her mother so upset, if her new eyes had let her. But Moonite eyes didn’t have tear ducts. No eyelids to cradle tears, no eyelashes to sweep them away. She stared unblinking and felt sorry for her mother, who was still alive, but locked in an inaccessible past.
The Third Generation
Chang E met H’yi in the lab, on her first day at work. He was the only rabbit there and he had the wary, closed-off look so many rabbits had.
At Chang E’s school the rabbit students had kept themselves to themselves. They had their own associations–the Rabbit Moonball Club, the Lapin Lacemaking Society–and sat in quiet groups at their own tables in the cafeteria.
Chang E had sat with her Moonite friends.
“There’s only so much you can do,” they’d said. “If they’re not making any effort to integrate …. ”
But Chang E had wondered secretly if the rabbits had the right idea. When she met other Earthlings, each one alone in a group of Moonites, they’d exchange brief embarrassed glances before subsiding back into invisibility. The basic wrongness of being an Earthling was intensified in the presence of other Earthlings. When you were with normal people you could almost forget.
Around humans Chang E could feel her face become used to smiling and frowning, every emotion transmitted to her face with that flexibility of expression that was so distasteful to Moonites. As a child this had pained her, and she’d avoided it as much as possible–better the smoothness of surface that came to her when she was hidden among Moonites.
At 24, Chang E was coming to understand that this was no way to live. But it was a difficult business, this easing into being. She and H’yi did not speak to each other at first, though they were the only non-Moonites in the lab.
The first time she brought human food to work, filling the place with strange warm smells, she kept her head down over her lunch, shrinking from the Moonites’ glances. H’yi looked over at her.
“Smells good,” he said. “I love noodles.”
“Have you had this before?” said Chang E. H’yi’s ears twitched. His face didn’t change, but somehow Chang E knew he was laughing.
“I haven’t spent my entire life in a warren,” he said. “We do get out once in a while.”
The first time Chang E slept over at his, she felt like she was coming home. The close dark warren was just big enough for her. It smelt of moon dust.
In H’yi’s arms, her face buried in his fur, she felt as if the planet itself had caught her up in its embrace. She felt the wall vibrate: next door H’yi’s mother was humming to her new litter. It was the moon’s own lullaby.
Chang E’s mother stopped speaking to her when she got married. It was rebellion, Ma said, but did she have to take it so far?
“I should have known when you changed your name,” Ma wept. “After all the effort I went to, giving you a Moonite name. Having the throat operation so I could pronounce it. Sending you to all the best schools and making sure we lived in the right neighbourhoods. When will you grow up?”
Growing up meant wanting to be Moonite. Ma had always been disappointed by how bad Chang E was at this.
They only reconciled after Chang E had the baby. Her mother came to visit, sitting stiffly on the sofa. H’yi made himself invisible in the kitchen.
The carpet on the floor between Chang E and her mother may as well have been a maria. But the baby stirred and yawned in Chang E’s arms–and stolen glance by jealous, stolen glance, her mother fell in love.
One day Chang E came home from the lab and heard her mother singing to the baby. She stopped outside the nursery and listened, her heart still.
Her mother was singing a rabbit song.
Creaky and true, the voice of an old peasant rabbit unwound from her mouth. The accent was flawless. Her face was innocent, wiped clean of murky passions, as if she’d gone back in time to a self that had not yet discovered its capacity for cruelty.
The Fourth Generation
When Chang E was 16, her mother died. The next year Chang E left school and went to Earth, taking her mother’s ashes with her in a brown ceramic urn.
The place her mother had chosen was on an island just above the equator, where, Ma had said, their Earthling ancestors had been buried. When Chang E came out of the environment-controlled port building, the air wrapped around her, sticky and close. It was like stepping into a god’s mouth and being enclosed by his warm humid breath.
Even on Earth most people travelled by hovercraft, but on this remote outpost wheeled vehicles were still in use. The journey was bumpy–the wheels rendered them victim to every stray imperfection in the road. Chang E hugged the urn to her and stared out the window, trying to ignore her nausea.
It was strange to see so many humans around, and only humans. In the capital city you’d see plenty of Moonites, expats and tourists, but not in a small town like this.
Here, thought Chang E, was what her mother had dreamt of. Earthlings would not be like moon humans, always looking anxiously over their shoulder for the next way in which they would be found wanting.
And yet her mother had not chosen to come here in life. Only in death. Where would Chang E find the answer to that riddle?
Not in the graveyard. This was on an orange hill, studded with white and grey tombstones, the vermillion earth furred in places with scrubby grass.
The sun bore close to the Earth here. The sunshine was almost a tangible thing, the heat a repeated hammer’s blow against the temple. The only shade was from the trees, starred with yellow-hearted white flowers. They smelled sweet when Chang E picked them up. She put one in her pocket.
The illness had been sudden, but they’d expected the death. Chang E’s mother had arranged everything in advance, so that once Chang E arrived she did not have to do or understand anything. The nuns took over.
Following them, listening with only half her attention on their droning chant in a language she did not know to a god she did not recognise, she looked down on the town below. The air was thick with light over the stubby low buildings, crowded close together the way human habitations tended to be.
How godlike the Moonites must have felt when they entered these skies and saw such towns from above. To love a new world, you had to get close to the ground and listen.
You were not allowed to watch them lower the urn into the ground and cover it with soil. Chang E looked up obediently.
In the blue sky there was a dragon.
She blinked. It was a flock of birds, forming a long line against the sky. A cluster of birds at one end made it look like the dragon had turned its head. The sunlight glinting off their white bodies made it seem that the dragon looked straight at her with luminous eyes.
She stood and watched the sky, her hand shading her eyes, long after the dragon had left, until the urn was buried and her mother was back in the Earth.
What was the point of this funeral so far from home, a sky’s worth of stars lying between Chang E’s mother and everyone she had ever known? Had her mother wanted Chang E to stay? Had she hoped Chang E would fall in love with the home of her ancestors, find a human to marry, and by so doing somehow return them all to a place where they were known?
Chang E put her hand in her pocket and found the flower. The petals were waxen, the texture oddly plastic between her fingertips. They had none of the fragility she’d been taught to associate with flowers.
Here is a secret Chang E knew, though her mother didn’t.
Past a certain point, you stop being able to go home. At this point, when you have got this far from where you were from, the thread snaps. The narrative breaks. And you are forced, pastless, motherless, selfless, to invent yourself anew.
At a certain point, this stops being sad–but who knows if any human has ever reached that point?
Chang E wiped her eyes and her streaming forehead, followed the nuns back to the temple, and knelt to pray to her nameless forebears.
She was at the exit when remembered the flower. The Lunar Border Agency got funny if you tried to bring Earth vegetation in. She left the flower on the steps to the temple.
Then Chang E flew back to the Moon.
April 25, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Rumjhum Biswas’s prose and poetry have been published in India and abroad, both in print and online, including Per Contra, South, Words-Myth, Everyday Fiction, Danse Macabre, Muse India, Kritya, Pratilipi, Eclectica, Nth Position, The King’s English, Arabesques Review, A Little Poetry, The Little Magazine, Etchings and Going Down Swinging. Her poem “Cleavage” was in the long list of the Bridport Poetry Competition 2006. Her story “Ahalya’s Valhalla” was among the notable stories of 2007 in Story South’s Million Writers’ Award.
Ducklings
“Shiuli!” called Nityananda as he peered into the dark. The pre-dawn air was chilly even though winter was months away. Nityananda hunched his shoulders and tried to draw the threadbare shawl tighter around him. Shivering as he rubbed his elbows in an effort to increase the circulation, Nityananda wondered how many more seasons his old bones would take. He prayed God would let him live long enough to see Shiuli married and Laltu and Poltu settled. “Shiuli! O Shiuli!” But the girl was nowhere to be seen. She must have gone to the pond. Nityananda had half a mind to go there and drag Shiuli back. It would be heartless, no doubt, but the girl had better learn early how hard their lot was.
Shiuli was eighteen and under happier circumstances would have been married already, with a child or two to show for it. But the double tragedy of losing both parents to Cholera one after the other in a span of just four weeks had turned Shiuli into a surrogate mother for her two younger brothers from the tender age of twelve. The boys, twins, were four years old at that time. Shuili’s three other siblings had also perished in the epidemic that swept their whole district, mowing down village after village. It was a miracle that three of his grandchildren managed to survive. Nityananda knew he was lucky. God had been merciful and spared a portion of his family when he could have taken them all in one fell swoop. Still Nityananda rued his fate. He wished that he had died instead of his son and daughter-in-law. God’s mercy was cruel. Or else why would able-bodied young people like Nityananda’s daughter-in-law and son die instead of an old man like him? Why would they, who were barely able to eke a living from the few animals and the little land that they owned, be assaulted by this sudden new scourge of such epidemic proportions? Why God why?
Shiuli had wanted to study. From the time she could hold a slate and chalk, she had followed her grandfather about repeating the letters of the alphabet and writing them down after Nityananda had scratched them out on the dry soil, frowning and wrinkling up her snub nose to see the letters better. Shiuli never let go until she had fully grasped Nityananda’s lesson for the day. The girl was smart. By the time she was seven Shiuli could add or subtract a whole bunch of numbers in her head and write full sentences. Haripada, Shiuli’s father used to be so proud of his clever daughter. Being the youngest child – the twins had not yet been born then – she was easily his favorite.
“Shiuli will be a teacher,” Haripada would say, picking up Shiuli and swinging her above his broad shoulders. “Every time our Shiuli walks past adjusting her spectacles and brandishing her ruler, everybody in the village will say, ‘Namoshkar Mashtarni Didimoni, namoshkar!”
Shiuli would giggle delightedly. Then, Nityananda would pipe in with a twinkle in his eyes, “But our Mashtarni Didimoni will say namoshkar to me, with folded hands every time she leaves for school, because I was her first teacher!” And Shiuli would promptly swing towards her dadu, her darling grandfather, from her father’s perch and grab his arms.
Yes, they use to have many dreams about Shiuli, dreams that were as sweet as the jasmine that scented their garden in summer. They would lie down under the stars and talk about Shiuli’s future even though Madhobi, Nityananda’s daughter-in-law, grumbled under her breath that the rightful place for girls was in her husband’s house and Shiuli was better off learning to cook and clean instead of getting her head full of frivolous ideas. Shiuli’s mother had her reasons. Neighbors often passed snide remarks about Haripada’s and Nityananda’s dreams. Besides, girl children were normally never allowed to finish school in the village. It was not the custom. At the most they studied up to class five or six. The village elders disapproved of so much attention paid to girls. They frowned upon girls gallivanting around after puberty. The earlier you married off a girl the better it was; there were few troubles and the groom’s family was usually willing to settle for less dowry, because the girls were fresh and tender. Nityananda himself had brought Madhobi home when she was barely fourteen and practically illiterate, but well versed in household duties and an expert cook. Madhobi was only twenty eight when, already weakened by multiple pregnancies and miscarriages, she succumbed to the Cholera epidemic when it hit their village. Haripada did not get a chance to mourn his wife for long. He followed some weeks later, after watching three of his children writhe in pain and die, one after the other.
Nityananda wiped the tears that pricked the corners of his rheumy eyes and trickled down. He went in to wake up the boys. Laltu and Poltu helped him feed their cow and the two goats. Meanwhile Shiuli fed the chickens and ducks. They had their breakfast of tea soaked with puffed rice only after all their animals and birds were fed. This was the first thing they did each morning, and it had been their routine ever since the rest of their family had died. The children had insisted on it; they could never bear to eat until all their four legged and winged family members had had their fill. The three children’s world revolved around these mute creatures that demanded their love and gave back in full measure with their nuzzling and cooing and clucking, following them about whenever Nityananda and his grandchildren were nearby. Shiuli always chattered with the chickens and ducks as if they were her own babies. She also chattered with the cow and the goats. But ever since the ducklings had hatched, all three children had become unnecessarily attached to them.
Not becoming unnecessarily attached to their livestock was something that Nityananda, being a life hardened and practical man believed in staunchly. His own behavior towards their livestock was gruff, not that it made much of a difference as far as the animals were concerned. They still went up to him and followed him when he was near them. Nityananda scolded them as he stroked the larger animals or threw a handful of puffed rice at the chickens and ducks. Nityananda knew that attachment created problems. Like that time when he had to sell the year old pie-bald male kid to the butcher and Laltu and Poltu had cried for days. Shiuli had consoled them and given him black looks side by side. She would never know how bad Nityananda had felt that day; as if he had sold his own grandson. But he had had to do it. What choice did he have? There was the loan to be repaid and taxes too. Someday, when they were grown up, they would understand.
Nityananda crossed the narrow four poster bed sized bit of courtyard that separated his room from that of the boys. He bent his head to avoid the strands of thatch hanging over the low doorway. He didn’t like to wake the boys up so early. They were so young; if they didn’t play and read and have fun now when would they ever? Time flows like a river and never stops for even a moment, thought Nityananda to himself. Soon the boys would be lost to manhood. The pleasures of running down a field or splashing in the water would be lost to them. The magic of a new world unfolding day by day would be gone forever. But what could he do?
Laltu and Poltu went to the free government primary school. Before they left for school in the morning, they helped Nityananda with the cow and the goats. Together they untied the animals and led them out down the village road. Once they reached a customer’s house, either Laltu or Poltu called out while Nityananda sat down on his haunches to milk the cow. The boys were quite adept at milking the goats, but Nityananda still preferred to do the cow himself. There was time enough for his grandsons. He measured and poured the milk from the pail into the vessel that his customer handed over. Laltu collected the money or wrote the amount and date in a notebook kept especially for those who preferred to pay at the month end. After that they moved on to the next house and then to the next, until all their customers were served. This was a slow and sometimes tedious process. It would have been better for Nityananda’s old bones if the boys’ took the milk to their customers later on in the day. Raw milk didn’t go bad if you kept strips of straw in the cans. It stayed good for atleast an hour or two. But people liked to buy milk that they could watch being milked straight from the cows. So Laltu and Poltu had to be woken up at the crack of dawn, even during holidays. Today however, they seemed to have got up on their own. Nityananda rubbed his eyes and looked again. The grass mats that served as their beds were empty.
“Shiuli! O Shiuli! Laltu! Poltu! Where are you?”
No one answered.
Suddenly feeling alarmed, Nityananda hurried out. He looked to the right and left and then went down to the pond. In the brightening morning light, though still misty, he was able to make out shadowy shapes huddled near the pond steps. He called again. The shapes remained still. A broken sob caught his ears. Nityananda ran towards the sound.
He found them sitting there, hugging the ducklings. This time it was Shiuli who was crying her heart out. Laltu and Poltu were crying too and trying to comfort her at the same time. Shiuli, bent over with grief, sat holding the ducklings to her bosom which would have held babies had their circumstances been different. Shiuli, weeping her heart out as if she was going to lose her own children to sickness. Shiuli, who no longer ran up numbers inside her head or read fluently from the day old newspaper that Nityananda sometimes brought home from the village school master’s house. Shiuli, who had grown day by day into an exact replica of her mother, and turned into a quiet dutiful woman, a good cook and a devoted home-maker.
Nityananda felt his heart cracking up under the weight of sorrow. His eyes stung, but the tears remained inside. He wished he could weep like these children. Hold the half grown ducklings to his bosom; shower them with kisses. But what was the use of getting emotional? This wretched bird flu had hit every village for miles around. The men in white suits would be coming over to claim the little ones, any day now. Any day.
April 25, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Alan Gould has published twenty books, comprising novels, collections of poetry and a volume of essays. His most recent novel is The Lakewoman which is presently on the shortlist for the Prime Minister’s Fiction Award, and his most recent volume of poetry is Folk Tunes from Salt Publishing. ‘Works And Days’ comes from a picaresque novel entitled The Poets’ Stairwell, and has been recently completed.
Works And Days
Now and then throughout the night, other coaches arrived at this depot, passengers disgorged, bought coffee at the all-night stall, returned to their seats, whereupon with a growl, their vehicles departed, for Athens, Istanbul, Skopje, Sofia. Henry and I returned to our seats, dozed upright, bought further coffees, waited for what the Turks might do. Dawn came up, strobe-yellow from behind the angular roofline, the disco closed down, and in the early light, now resembled any old garage. But our two feckless Turkish drivers had vanished along with their plump Greek girls and the hundreds of spectral dancers we had glimpsed under the blue lights. As it became clear some fraud had been practiced on us and we were not going on to Athens, one by one our fellow passengers took their bags from the lockers and dispersed into the industrial town.
‘What’s the verb from ‘feckless,’ I tilted to Henry.
‘Well and truly fecked,’ he rejoined, hoisting his pack. And we went looking for a roof.
We found a room in Thessalonika quite quickly, but the city promised to be tedious for an enforced stay. Here were shopwindows displaying lathes, compressors, saw-benches, a workaday town without a historic relic in sight. By late morning we had wandered to the waterfront, where we met Martha.
There was a wharf, and a Greek woman thrashed a squid against the timbers. Behind her the Aegean resembled hammered tin. To one side were monstrous derricks and several bright container ships. The day was warm and the scene was held by a complete inertia but for the woman’s exertions with her squid. Some loafers sat on bollards, watching her or minding a fishing line. And there was also the American girl who had been on our Istanbul coach, regarding the treatment of the squid with evident dismay. Hup! And thunk!
‘Like, I know they gotta eat,’ she said, seeing Henry and I approach.
‘It loosens the guts, I suppose,’ I offered.
‘That is still one helluva way to treat a squid.’
‘You’re probably right.’
We all three watched. This American girl was solidly built with short blonde hair and small eyes that now showed an expression of affront. Indeed I wondered whether she intended to intervene on behalf of the squid. If she did there would be a scene, and this, I recognized, would disappoint me because I found the Greek woman’s heave and slap rather magnificent. Here was someone putting her whole being into the simple domestic task. Up flew her arm with the long, glistening squid at the end of it. Then with an undulation that ran from squid-tentacle to human ankle, down came the creature with a forward jerk of the woman’s torso, a bounce of her ample bosom and a resounding crack as the squid hit the boards. Hup and smack! Hup and smack! I thought of Eva, and how she would have relished this turning of task into dance, immemorial.
‘One helluva way to treat a squid!’
Henry had watched the spectacle, then lost interest and gone to the wharf edge where he gazed at the oily sway of the sea. But for our different reasons the American and I remained transfixed.
‘I concede I’d prefer gentler treatment for my own insides if I was being prepared for a meal.’
‘I’m thinking of that squid,’ she dismissed my attempt at charm.
‘Actually, I find this rather a thrilling sight.’
Hup and smack, hup and smack, and the Greek woman a silhouette against the glary Aegean behind her!
‘O sure thing! It’s ethnic as hell.’
‘And beautiful in its way.’
‘It’s still one helluva…’ and she shook her head, leaving the sentence unfinished, distressed by the sight, unable to tear herself away.
When I made to rejoin Henry, I found she had followed me. ‘May I tag along awhile?’ she asked. ‘I’m kinda lonesome right now.’
‘Of course,’ I agreed, and learned that she was Martha from Muncie, Indiana, where
she practiced as a plumber. I saw she had big hands and long fingers. ‘Boon&Luck,’ I introduced ourselves. ‘Both poets,’ I owned.
‘You say that’s your livelihood?’ asked Martha. ‘That’s weird.’
‘Not livelihood,’ I allowed. ‘Somewhere between an aspiration and a place in history.’
‘History? Speak for yourself,’ Henry interposed.
‘I don’t get any of this,’ said Martha. ‘You gotta have a livelihood.’
‘Poetry is a kind of money,’ Henry was prompt to supply the Stevens, which left Martha further bewildered.
‘And you…um… plumb?’ I asked.
‘You getta lotta treeroots and sick smells come out of a job,’ Martha brought our conversation to earth. ‘But sometimes I get to do a course on plastics or the latest hydraulic theory. I never grew outta liking being in school.’
‘What brings you to Greece?’ Henry asked.
‘I got kinda itchy for some of the things I learned back in school.’
‘Like?’
‘Like, well, that war they had with the Trojans. I’ve just come from there. And like, all those Gods and Goddesses having ding dongs with each other.’
At a waterside café, we took coffee, then some lunch. Martha did most of the talking, about her visit to the Troy diggings at Hissarlik. It was a methodical presentation, but something in this person brought out a kindliness and patience in Henry that I might not have expected. We wandered further down the waterfront, retraced our steps and found ourselves back beside the Greek woman, now resting from her squid-thrashing, her galvanized bucket containing a mash of several squid at her side.
‘I kinda think I’ve seen this town enough,’ Martha stated. ‘I don’t like discos and bad ladies and someone smashing hell out of a poor squid. When you travel, you come across places that kinda have no poetry I guess.’
‘On the contrary!’
We both glanced at Henry who held his body poised with conviction, like a heron that has just seized a minnow. ‘Everywhere you look you can see a town saturated with Hesiod.’
‘What’s Hesiod?’ asked Martha.
‘A poet,’ I knew enough to explain.
Henry might have given us dates, a lifestory, but instead he advised us to check out Works and Days. ‘Hesiod’s your boy for tool shops and working women of one sort or another.’
‘I don’t know that guy,’ Martha decided, her attention drifting back to the tub of mashed squid and her face clouding as she did so.
‘Do you believe in the dignity of honest labour?’ I should say that Henry was positively firing his questions.
‘I guess.’
‘Protestant work ethic, etcetera.’
‘Of course,’ Martha glanced at her interrogator with sudden suspicion. ‘I belong to our church.’
‘Good. Well, the Protestant work ethic is pure Hesiod.’
‘Hesiod was a Protestant?’
‘Absolutely,’ Henry nodded with that grave deliberation indicating he was having fun.
‘I didn’t know that,’ Martha pondered this new information. ‘At school I learned about Socrates and hemlock,’ she decided to risk.
‘Hesiod is pre-Socratic.’
‘And yet he’s a Protestant?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘I don’t get that.’
‘Do you think present times are degenerate in comparison to a past golden age?’
This caused Martha to take her eyes off the squid bucket and look at Henry’s intent, mischievous face reflectively. ‘I sometimes have a gut feeling that things are coming kinda unstuck these days,’ she conceded at length.
‘Mankind has a golden, silver and iron age – in that order?’
‘I guess we all think that deep down.’
‘Then Hesiod’s your boy for things coming unstuck.’
‘So he’s important, right?’
‘He’s critical,’ Henry affirmed for her. ‘Final question!’ and my companion poet was not quite able to hide his smirk, ‘Do you like the poetry of Robert Frost?’
‘Of course! Frost is a great poet. He is taught at school.’
‘Frost’s poetry could not have existed had there been no Hesiod.’
Martha’s brow furrowed at this connection. ‘I don’t get that either.’
‘Poets of a present age learn to speak by taking in the speech of poets from an earlier age. It is a process identical with how infants learn to speak by absorbing the speech of their parents. Frost is a pastoral poet because Hesiod established the territory of pastoral poetry.’
‘That’s kinda neat.’
‘It is very neat indeed,’ Henry trumped.
‘I thought Frost was a pastoral poet because he liked writing about his farm,’ I ventured to check the progress of the lesson.
‘The farm was incidental,’ Henry could not disguise his smirk. ‘The farm was inert without earlier text to animate its possibilities of meaning.’
‘I guess this Hesiod must have been quite some guy,’ declared Martha.
‘He was,’ said Henry. ‘For instance he advised people not to urinate where the sun can see you.’
‘I can see that makes sense,’ Martha the plumber nodded, willing to be taken along now, for all that the information came at such headlong pace.
‘Hesiod discouraged people from telling lies simply for the sake of making talk….’
‘Ri-ight,’ Martha was not sure how this one related to being a poet.
‘…Which is to say’ Henry continued headlong, ‘we have a poet at the dawn of poetry who understood the pathology of people who get nervous in conversation.’
‘I get nervous like that,’ Martha brightened at the recognition. ‘I get kinda muddled and blurt, and then falsehoods come out.’
‘Exactly,’ Henry clinched. ‘Hesiod also said that sometimes a day can be your stepmother. And sometimes a day can be your mother.’
‘I think that one just gets me confused,’ she decided. Nonetheless I could see she was intrigued by the proposition.
‘So you see, Hesiod tackles the gut issues,’ Henry summed up. ‘You must read Hesiod at your earliest opportunity.’
‘I guess I’ll do that.’
She had been distracted entirely from the squid-bucket now. So had I. And once again Henry had performed according to his genius. He had taken the substance of books and brought it to thrilling life. Yes, I would re-read Hesiod at the earliest opportunity, now that print on a page was somehow made vibrant, as the blades of light scintillant on the sea beside us, as the gleam of the squid in their galvanized bucket.
We strolled the waterfront. Henry moved us from Hesiod to Heraclitus and the pre-Socratics. Thales, with his view that the underlying substance of reality was water, was a plumber’s gift that Henry did not neglect to present to Martha. We took an early dinner of moussaka and retsina at a waterside café, walked some more in order to tackle Pythagoras, then parted, Martha to her tent at a campsite, Henry and I to the small, cement-smelling room. In the morning the three of us met again at the same café and when it came time to catch the Athens train Martha again requested she be allowed to tag along.
‘I’m kinda more curious than lonesome now,’ she said.
‘There’s ground to cover,’ Henry welcomed her along, and in Martha I recognized, we had a Henry Luck project in view. From it I would gain an insight into the purity of his altruism.
April 25, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Maria Takolander’s poetry, fiction and essays have been widely published. She is the author of a book of poems, Ghostly Subjects(Salt, 2009), which was shortlisted for a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award in 2010. She is also the winner of the 2010 Australian Book Review Short Story Competition. She is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies and Creative Writing at Deakin University in Geelong.
Hide
Night has settled through the house like silt. My bedroom is as dark as my nursery memory of it, as dark as my child brain, which is only beginning to build an image of the world inside my skull cave. The plaster walls are what I remember the most, although I think of them not in terms of paint colour or wall paper but only in terms of their hidden chalkiness and how they persist in the shadows. I remember, too, the framed cavity where the door hangs open to the darkness of the hallway, and the draped space where the window is allowed to exist untroubled by day. I remember nothing about the furnishings, although I assume—or is this a memory?—that in the room there is a foam mattress and bedclothes colourless as the walls. And I assume that I am on that bed, too, although I cannot see myself or feel myself on it. It is as if I do not exist in the world. It is as if I am like the shadows. But I know that I exist because I know that, out there, beyond my bedroom door, something terrible is happening.
My sister, barefoot in her synthetic, pale-pink nighty, appears in my room, body-real and dangerous, urging me to leave with her, to come and help, even though I am not really there, even though I will never want anything less. Are there words for this child-whispering, for the flesh-and-blood crumbs she holds out to me, compelling me to come out of hiding, to cross the threshold into witnessing and remembering?
Sometimes I think that the memory belongs to her and that she gave it to me, like a birthday cake, at a later time. But I must own this memory in some original way because I remember the warmth of her hand. I feel how her nylon nighty hides electricity as she leads me down the hallway, dense with night. And I see how the floorboards and wall in the hallway ahead, outside the entranceway to the lounge room, are striped by the streetlight entering through the Venetian blinds. I find myself remembering that, on some other night, strange men with shaved heads and tight jeans had gathered on the street outside the lounge room in packs and that a brown bottle had crashed through the window, tangling in the still-broken blinds. Another evening in the lounge room, abruptly littered with gifts, I had unwrapped a tin of colouring pencils next to the white figure of a tree fit for a storm.
At the end of the hallway, past the striped light, there is a bedroom with its door ajar, behind which there appears to be a movie screening. I can tell by the yellow light streaming through the crack of the door and the loud voices and the skin noise that it is an adult movie, not a movie I want to see, not like the one about Mary Poppins, who has a friend—the smiling chimney sweep—and an umbrella like a lollipop with which to steal me away into the spangled night.
My sister, in her synthetic, pale-pink nighty, moves down the hallway towards the bedroom, pulling me behind her. When she reaches the bedroom door, with the vertical stripe of yellow light beaming along the door jamb and the movie playing inside turned suddenly quiet, she lets go of my hand. I watch as she touches the painted surface of the door with her fingertips. Then, from my position behind her night-gowned body and her outstretched arm, as the electric light, like radiation, floods her face, I look at what she is looking at. And I see what is on.
There is a naked light bulb and a mirror, gilded and tricky, on the wall above a double bed that has a threadbare, purple coverlet. And there is a man kneeling on the rumpled, purple coverlet with his back to me. The blonde hair on the back of his head, which I can see directly in the bright room, is matted, and his face, which I can see in the shining space of the mirror, is flattened. His fists, which I look at in the glinting mirror and then in the luminous room, are clenched by his sides.
My sister, standing in the frame of the door in front of me, lit up like a shard of glass by the sun, says something. She opens her lips and makes a sound. She says his name. She says it in a voice so small that it could be me who is saying it.
The man turns, the yellow light bulb setting his face aglow. He is in the room, and he is in the mirror. He looks strange: empty or full. I wonder if there is a man behind his eyes. I am afraid, but he does not see me among the shadows. He looks at my sister in her pink nighty and in her skin, and she glimmers and burns while he flares and blazes like a fire lapped by the wind. When his mouth opens, he roars and leaps from the bed. The light is shattering.
The door slams shut.
I see a gush of air puff my sister’s hair and nightgown, and then suddenly there is my face and body cast like the living into the ashes of the night. I am aware of my skin and the way it covers my flesh and bones and of something else—strange, jagged and quiet—embedded within. But only after I glimpse, in all that razing light, a woman’s body—adult words: torso, arms, legs—on the purple coverlet, and a white, cotton nightgown—private word, child word: nighty, nighty—ripped on the floor.
*
Afternoon has settled through the house like a ghost of the day. I am older—just a little—and this is a room that I remember. I have hidden under the bed with the threadbare, purple coverlet, lying on my stomach on the dust-covered floorboards, feet to the headboard and the wall. The mirror, I know, is hanging above there, its depths swallowing light, but it helps that I cannot see it and that it cannot see me.
What I can see, straight ahead of me, are the tapered, timber legs at the end of the bed, and the dangling, ragged fringes of the purple coverlet. I can also see the fourth and last drawer of a timber-laminated dressing table that occupies the wall at the foot of the bed. One of the handles on the bottom drawer is missing, and although I do not like the bronze shapeliness of the one that is there, I dislike even more the two, dark screw-holes in the timber where the handle was once attached. Between the bed and the dressing table is a stretch of clean floor, but beneath the dressing table is dust, so still, like a held breath, that the mirror cannot see it. There are maroon curtains to the right, hovering just above the varnished boards, with dust hidden beneath them, too, and a tall cupboard to the left, which is made of heavy timber and has doors that do not properly close. The hallway is also to the left, and I can see its emptiness through the open bedroom door.
I am not alone. I have, clenched in my arms, squashed between my body and the floor, a toy clown. It is as big as me and so floppy in its limbs and neck that it might be broken. The fabric is felt-like and yellow-coloured where there is skin. It has yellow wool for hair, and its eyebrows and mouth are made from white sausage-shaped pieces of material. It has crosses in the place of eyes, sewn in inch-long, blue, woolen stitches, and it is clothed in a jumpsuit, which is fastened to its body at the ankles, wrists and neck and made from flannel patterned with images of children’s blocks, each with letters of the alphabet.
The clown feels misshapen and fragile tangled beneath my body and in my crossed arms, but I am trying not to move, and I believe, in any case, that I will not be waiting here long. I breathe lightly through my nose so as not to disturb the yellow wool of the clown’s hair, which sticks out through my arms, or the dust on the floor in front of my face. I watch the vacant hallway through the frame of the open door.
I have since been told—perhaps after looking at a photograph album, in which I remember seeing a badly lit image of myself on a vinyl kitchen chair with the clown in my arms—that I carried the clown everywhere with me as a child, until the day its head broke away from its torso and clots of wadding started to fall out. I know that the toy was pressed, as I slept one night, into one of the plastic bins crowded with shapeless rubbish bags in the dark, narrow yard at the side of the house. But I can remember having the toy clown with me only one other time.
I was squatting with my sister in the backyard in the shadow of the grey paling fence. The grass there was lush and long. There were crickets, black and sleek, clinging to the blades of grass, and cobwebs packed in the crevices of the old fence like stuffing. I had my clown with me, bunched under one of my arms. My sister had her clown with her, too. We were listening to three children, older than both of us, playing on a trampoline on the other side of the fence. I remember that I wanted to look at them and that I wanted them to look at me, with a desire I felt in my crouched body as if it had been invaded by a stranger, reckless and ready to be unmasked. But climbing the fence was my sister’s idea.
Standing next to her, with my toes on the middle rail of the fence and my fingers curled over the splintered wood of the top rail, I held my silence. My clown hung beside me, one of its yellow, fabric hands trapped between my hand and the rough timber of the fence. My sister had her clown with her, too, folded under her left arm. She peered over the ragged edges of the palings. I raised myself on my toes and peered over, too.
I saw three dark-haired and bare-footed children on a trampoline in an otherwise empty backyard that looked much like ours. There was a fat girl, curled into a ball in the centre of the trampoline mat, and two boys, who were older than her. They were trying to make her bounce. The girl saw me and sat up. Her brothers then stopped and looked. They said things in a language I did not understand, but I recognised the slow smile on the girl’s face and the boys’ too-loud laughter, and I was glad that the worn fence was there, marking the edges of the known world. I climbed back down, and my sister climbed down after me. As I stood on the cool grass, holding the hand of my clown, there was nothing to be said. I remember the feeling of loneliness that comes with shame, that I looked to the dark windows of my house, but there my memory fails.
My memory of the day that I lay under the bed with the purple coverlet, with my clown tucked in my arms, is clearer. I am waiting for my sister to come home from her first day at school.
The hallway remains empty. The dust beneath the dressing table in front of me does not move. I look at the two, dark screw-holes in the veneered timber of the bottom drawer, where the bronze handle is missing. I think about the mirror on the wall above the bed, and I find that I am suddenly unsure.
Should my sister be home by now? I no longer understand why I came to hide under the bed. Do I want my sister to come looking for me, or am I afraid that she will?
I hold the clown tightly and keep still, but I feel that I have been robbed of something, as if the mirror had been looking at me all this time after all.
*
The morning arrives with a dusky silence. With my sister, I walk down the hallway, past the empty lounge room with the damaged Venetian blinds, to the bedroom at the end. The maroon curtains are still drawn, the mirror, in the dimness, is closed onto itself, and the bed with the purple coverlet is unmade. The knotted fringes of the coverlet trail on the naked floorboards, and in the murkiness of the room they look like the legs of so many large spiders, all dead.
I do not know what time it is, but I have been going to school for some months now—my sister for more than a year—and I understand what I have to do. I begin to get dressed. There is enough light coming through the curtain parting to enable me to see what I am doing. In the tall cupboard with the doors that cannot close, I find the short slip-dress with the blue swirling pattern, like marble, which I especially like, and a pair of white shoes. My sister chooses an orange dress with buttons. On the dressing table, there is a tube of lipstick, a bottle of mascara, a compact with three colours of eye-shadow—green, blue-green and blue—and a small round mirror with a retractable silver stand. I do not look at the dark mirror on the wall behind.
Before I leave for school, my sister makes us both lunch in the kitchen, buttering four slices of black bread, which she pulls out of the plastic bag left on the table. I put my sandwich in my handbag. We leave the house, my sister making sure to close the front door behind us, and walk down the driveway. We pass the line of khaki-coloured succulents, which seep pus when the leaves snap, and turn onto the cement footpath. As we walk past our neighbour’s house, a squat woman in a smock, with curlers in her netted hair, rushes out from behind a screen door and across her front lawn. She grabs me by my wrist and my sister by her forearm. She looks at me as if I have forgotten something.
And it is true that I have, for while I remember what happened that morning, I remember little of the preceding night. I assume, for instance, that there was a drive home from the hospital along streets fire-lit by headlights. I should be able to remember the private feeling of being in the backseat of the car in my dressing gown and, when I got home, the glow of the porch light and the sound of scoria under the tyres. Did I click on the bear-shaped night light on the floor next to my mattress when I got back into bed? Did I ask my sister to sleep with me then?
But I remember nothing of the events that occurred after—or before—I saw the woman on a trolley, its wheels dark as ash and uneasy on the vinyl floor, disappear down the yawing hallway under the fluorescent lights of the hospital corridor, and the man with the blonde hair re-enter the waiting room, looking at the wall.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Carolyn van Langenburg is the author of three books of literary fiction: The Teetotaller’s Wake, Fish Lips and Blue Moon, published by Indra press. Her collection of poems was published by Picaro in 2007. She has travelled widely in Asia and resides in the Blue Mountains with her husband.
Idea for a Story
Leaves dance in the air.
Dust whirls across the park.
A dog yelps at its tail. Boys run around anything and everything.
A woman’s hands disappear, her forearms disappear. A box draws her in, and then she pulls her arms out of the box and raises her hands high in the air. They dart like pale birds, flit and swoop into the box.
They dart like pale birds…
Paper plates smeared with chocolate icing and the grainy green slicks of tabouli spill out of park garbage bins. Flip flop with chewed chicken wings and an empty pvc bottle that takes off with the wind to have a go at the dog. The dog jumps at the bottle and grovels it as if it were a bone. The bottle, too big for its mouth, jerks and rolls and whizzes.
A woman’s legs walk under a box. Do the legs belong to the woman with the disappearing hands? The dog runs at the heels of the legs. The box bobs and jerks above a body. When the dog races back to the rolling bottle, the box with legs stops.
The head of the woman with the disappearing hands appears as the whole of the woman’s body bends to pick something up off the grass. She holds the retrieved thing high, pinched between thumb and forefinger, fingers furled into the palm of her hand…
No camera can see between the soft pads of her fingers furled over the top of her palm, which they touch. She stands still, holding up something small to examine, the box balanced against her hip. She may be reading a sign. She may be one of those women who look for signs to decipher, one who pinches salt to toss over her shoulder for good luck. Caught in this part of her life, she repeats her daily routine, juggling many banal tasks to keep food on the table and clothes on her child’s back. She may look for signs of future good fortune because money is tight. She worries, or does she, about her son’s performance at school, how much television he watches and how few books interest him. Is he a slow reader? How can the camera tell us anything about the life these two live? As it is, if a camera were to pan this action, it will record that a woman dressed for a picnic in a park carries a box. Her shirt, worn under a sweatshirt, is bright red and her jeans are faded around the knees. She looks dishevelled. What significance will the camera capture in its frame? What message will be decoded by the decipherers of the visual medium of this woman who loses her hands in a box filled with party food? How will they interpret her holding high something pinched between her thumb and forefinger? Is the message portending that, as she is a mother providing a happy birthday party for her son, she will be rewarded in the future with charming gummy grandchildren? Do those who spend their lives deciphering images drive the life out of motherhood, perching it on top of sentimental interpretation that diminishes humanity?
She is a woman providing a birthday party for her son. That’s all, in a snapshot.
The wind tears a feather from the tips of her fingers…
The wind pelts the bottle with stirred up city grit. The wind smacks twigs and empty crisp bags at the bottle. The wind whips the bottle with wrappers and ripped newsprint…
Boys yell and run, dog runs and barks, bottle rolls and whistles…
The woman hoists the box, her head disappears and she stumbles. The box wobbles where her head ought to be, flips open and flap-flaps…
Add a black sky and the drum roll of thunder with a few big drops of rain working up to a downpour and the scene is set.
In parenthesis
The woman stands at a picnic table in the park. The dog noses a pvc bottle rolling near her feet. Boys cluster at one end of the table, joking about bullshit and who is full of it. The woman’s hands disappear into a box then reappear. They are transformed into birds that rise in the air, swoop and land on the table before taking off again. Her hands plunge into the box again — her hands become other things like bowls and food containers, escaping her attention. Her inattentive eyes mirror the sky that they skim. Grey, they are, with a tree blackening in front of darkening grey…
Cake rises above box.
Candles under her chin burst into little flames. Boys cheer. They yell a song about a happy birthday to you. A red-faced boy blows out the little flames. The other boys congratulate him for being full of bullshit. Hands become knife, knife cuts cake, boys stuff triangles of cake in their mouths.
The dog’s mouth is never shut.
And so the story begins:
A woman packs bowls and paper plates and empty plastic food containers into a box. She pushes chewed chicken wings and plates streaked with tabouli and chocolate icing into the park garbage bin. The wind hurls the paper plates out of the garbage bin, tosses them to the ground, whips them across the grass where an empty pvc bottle rolls. The wind and the bottle tease the dog that jumps at the bottle and grovels it as if it were a bone. The wind whips at boys, pushing them backwards when they run forwards. The sky is blackening, the clouds rapidly broiling and thickening. Big raindrops fall and the yelping boys take off towards cars parked under big trees. The woman gathers up the box of birthday party things. When the dog barks and the boys shout, her head vanishes.
The park is suddenly dark.
Thunder drumrolls.
The woman stumbles through pouring rain to one of the parked cars. Her head pops up when the box drops and lands between her breasts and the side of one of the cars.
When the drenched woman sinks behind the steering wheel of her car, she looks into the rear vision mirror. The birthday boy, two of his friends and the dog sit in a row on the backseat, grins wet, panting hard.
Question stops story: Where does dog begin and boy end?
The next thing that happens is natural. Lightning strikes the ground not far from the car and the thunder that follows is deafening. The dog howls. The birthday boy pulls the dog onto his lap and presses his hands over the dog’s ears. All the boys, lanky limbs crisscrossing lanky limbs, talk one over the top of each other about how doggy ears hurt when noises are loud like thunder.
The woman behind the steering wheel pushes at wet strands of hair and sort of smiles. She looks enigmatic, like the Mona Lisa. That’s what the camera records. Being a mother is a state of being, like being Mona Lisa. The image of her as a mother who looks like the Mona Lisa conceals her occupation. She is a writer.
She galvanises the energy to start the car, a story beginning to unravel in her head. It’s about a birthday party that ends when lightning strikes.
[Acknowledgement: Luis Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000.]
An earlier version of this story first appeared in Staples, issue 7
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Brian Park was born and raised in New Jersey and graduated from Rutgers University with a bachelor’s in English Literature. After graduation, he moved to Seoul, South Korea where he currently resides. He has travelled throughout much of the last few years, which is the basis for the stories he has written.
The Return of Jack and Johnny
Serena and I parted over a cup of Lao coffee. She was going to stay in Pakse and I was going to get on a bus to Stung Treng, Cambodia. My trip was nearly at an end. I only had five days left.
We sat there talking about Lao coffee, about the plateaus where it came from, the high and misty jungle villages she would soon be visiting, and found ourselves staring at the grounds at the bottom of the mug with nothing else to say. I told her she would have a great time in Pakse and she wished me luck in Cambodia and a safe trip back to New York. I picked up my bag and hoisted it over my shoulder again. Here was our fork in the river, so we watched each other float away laughing. So goes another goodbye in the morning.
An hour later, I was riding in the back of a covered-truck driving towards the southern border of Laos and Cambodia through the flat plains and fields of yellow-green grasses. The back of the truck was lined with two benches on either side so we could ride facing each other or lean out to watch the countryside pass by. The women covered their heads and their faces with scarves so only their eyes were showing. The school-children sat silently, patiently waiting, speaking in secret conversations amongst each other, riding hours away from home for whatever reason, something in the city. At some rest-stops along the way, brief as they were, the sides of the truck would suddenly become filled with food and hands and down on the ground the eyes and faces of girls trying to sell the little bundles they had. I bought plenty of food to eat along the way. Sticky rice rolled in bamboo was essential. The chicken a godsend. The lychee branches a much needed touch.
And then sometime around noon, when the sun was high in the sky and burning its intense yellow light over the lush fields of green, the truck stopped and I was motioned to get out. I was one of the last ones left in the truck. Where the rest of them would go, I did not know. Where I was, I did not know. All I knew was this was where one ride would lead to another, and then another, until at the end of the day I would finally get there. I had done this all before. I knew the system well. There was a motorbike parked at this small crossroads in the middle of nowhere and that’s where I got on. I waved goodbye to the kids left in the covered-truck and then got on the back of the motorbike. We rode through the fields and then took a shortcut through an emerald green forest down one long dirt path in the middle of the woods. I was having flashbacks of falling but feeling peaceful for the trees surrounding me. And then we arrived at the border and the peace stopped. Here were the complications.
The guard sitting at the border was a rough intimidating character, a person who seemed like he hated his job. Perhaps he was angry over the little amount of power he had in the destiny of the world and had to compensate by controlling the destinies of those who came to his gate. I had come to the wrong gate, he told me. I had to get a visa at the other gate.
“How much is the visa?” I asked, even though I already knew, just to see if he would jerk me around.
“Twenty-five dollar,” he told me with that hard look on his face.
“How am I supposed to get there?”
“You figure out! There are driver over there,” he yelled and pointed. I felt my blood rising and struggled to suppress Jack Bauer. Nobody yells at Jack Bauer and lives to yell again…
“Ok, take it easy, Jesus Christ…” I muttered and walked towards where he was pointing.
The border consisted of the guard shack, the roughly built wooden office, and a small family-owned restaurant with a wooden overhang where currently five or six boys and girls sat quietly in the shade playing on the dirt floor; the two drivers, one with black sunglasses and the other with a blue-striped polo shirt, stood about laughing and talking with the motorbike guy who was apparently a friend of theirs. The fish had begun to fry.
“Hi, how are you doing?” I said amiably, concealing my suspicion. I could already see a three-pronged effort on the cooperation of these drivers to try and shake me of what precious bills I had left. I was down to my last hundred-dollar bill. Besides that, I had a handful of kip which would soon be obsolete. In Cambodia, the currency is riel, but like Laos, dollars talk the loudest. Prepare for the ugly surprise.
“Hello,” the one in the blue-striped shirt said. “Do you need a ride?”
“Uh, yes. Apparently, my driver,”I said nodding my head towards the dirty and deranged motorbike driver, now looking like an escaped mental-patient with his helmet off, “took me to the wrong border. So I need a ride to the visa office and then to Stung Treng.”
“Stung Treng,” blue-stripes guy repeated thoughtfully. “Stung Treng, maybe we will do for fifty dollar.”
“FIFTY DOLLAR?!” I shouted.
I hadn’t meant to lose my cool so early. My plan was to, with calm and Oscar-worthy hustle, ask their price and then pretend to lose interest saying, “I guess I’ll just walk there”, or “Eh, nothing to see in Cambodia anyway. Well, thanks anyway fellahs,” ever so casually walking away whistling a tune as they called after me asking me to name my own price. But the shock of his first price was so great, I nearly lost it. All I could think was, “Oh my god, what if it really is fifty dollars? I’m screwed!”
I quickly regained composure, the little boys and girls and the puppies and the soft yellow chicks now looking at me from the cool dirt floor. And then blue-stripes guy added,
“And you must pay the motorbike… (He conversed in Lao with the motorbike guy)… ten dollar.”
“PAY THE MOTORBIKE GUY??? TEN DOLLAR???”
They were quite curious about my reaction. “These foreigners sure do have quick tempers”, they must’ve been thinking…
I was pacing back and forth now, calling the only one I could rely on in a situation like this. It was time to resurrect J.C… Johnny Cochran!!!
“Now hold on, hold on, hold on just one minute. Let me get this straight gentlemen,” I said walking before the jury of children, puppies, and chicks, “let me make sure I’m clear. You’re telling me, the ride to the visa office is double the amount of the visa itself? Preposterous! And you,” I said, now addressing the motorbike guy, “it seems rather curious that you would take me to the wrong border, just where your two friends happen to be standing around waiting. Tell me sir, how long have you known these two gentlemen?”
Motorbike guy gave me a puzzled look and looked to blue-stripes guy for help.
“We work together for many year,” blue-stripes guy answered for him.
“Yes, I’m sure you have. Bringing people to the wrong gates and then SKYROCKETING THE PRICE! Gentlemen,” I said leaning in now, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’LL TELL YOU WHAT I’LL DO,” I said making a big show for the children, puppies, and chicks who now stared at me with wide-eyes,
“I’m going to forget the insult of that first asking price. I’m going to PAY THIS MAN,”I said loudly so all could hear and bear witness as I counted out wrinkled bills of kip into the bewildered motorbike guy’s ripped and dirty glove, “I’m going to PAY THIS MAN the amount that I feel HIS SERVICES earned him this day. Now let’s see, we rode on the dirt road for about thirty-minutes, at about fifty miles per hour… who’s good at math here?”
“Sir,” blue-stripes guy said stepping in, “that is not enough. Do you have dollar?”
“I don’t know… do you have a car?”
He looked at me with a puzzled expression.
“Alright, let’s end this. I don’t have all morning,” I said, even though I really did. “I’ll pay you fifteen dollars. That’s fifteen,” I said showing them the hundred-dollar bill (I didn’t have change), “good old greenback Americana. What do you say?”
“AND I’LL PAY THIS GUY,” I added motioning to the dirty and confused motorbike driver, “five bucks, which HE DIDN’T EARN, but just so we all go home happy? Ok?”
They talked amongst themselves for a minute. The children and puppies and baby-chicks looked at me with wide-staring eyes as I apologized to them silently for being such a jackass. “The world made me this way,” I mouthed silently to them, but they didn’t understand. Not yet anyway…
“It is too small,” blue-stripes guy said. “Not enough to even pay gas. Stung Treng many kilometer. Take two hour driving.”
“What? Hey, come on. I could drive on twenty dollars easily in America! Are you telling me—”
At that point, the-angry-guard-who-hated-his-destiny came up and began getting involved after hearing all of that yelling; deciding to take care of the small zone which Providence had left in his control.
“You must pay driver!” he yelled. “You come to wrong gate! You buy visa, then you go to Stung-Treng!”
“Stay out of this you goddamn deputy!” I snarled. Jack Bauer was beginning to rear his larynx-cracking head from beneath the muddy waters…
“WHAT?! I’LL KILL YOU!!!” the guard screamed and grabbed his machine-gun as I quickly dived to the ground and pulled the revolver out of my ankle-holster, squeezing off three shots before hitting the ground…
Just kidding. That’s not what happened.
What actually happened was the guard came over. We drank some tea and worked out our misunderstandings. And it turned out that I was right, he really was unhappy with his destiny. Who knew on that early afternoon on the border of Cambodia and Laos, two grown men would be crying in reconciliation…
“You have to be tough in this business, you know?” blubbered the angry guard, “Do you know how many pedophiles and child molesters and drug addicts come through those gates every day? You think I don’t want to smile? You think I like yelling? Every day, I wave these bastards into my country so they can corrupt and molest and destroy the innocence of my children, our children. I have to be tough! I have to be mean!”
“I’m so sorry,” I said sympathetically, “If only those sons-of-bitches in Washington… It’s just this war keeps dragging on and on… and that lying son-of-a-bitch Johnson!”
“Why do we do this to each other?” he asked with tears in his eyes. “Why do people always destroy the things they love?”
At about sunset, the ride to Stung Treng was complete. I paid sunglasses guy the $20 we agreed on even though I knew I was being ripped off. The motorbike-guy got $5. That meant I had $75 left for five days. Plenty of money for a short stay in Cambodia, as long as there were no more ugly surprises. But there were always ugly surprises. They grew everywhere like daisies concealing Africanized-bees hidden inside with itchy stingers on their asses. And I was trying to stop and smell as many flowers as I could before that plane ride back to winter in New Jersey…
Stung Treng is a small town built with wide-open streets and no traffic, dilapidated buildings that offered nothing. In the centre of town was a small street-market which sold bootleg clothing and other knick-knacks. There were small shops selling cigarettes and soap. Barrels filled with ethanol where motorbikes would stop to refuel their small gas-tanks. A few barbecue stands with no meat stood waiting along the sidewalk overlooking the blue Mekong River offering warm cans of beer and soda floating in coolers filled with water. As far as the good old distraction of commerce was concerned, that was about all that I could see happening in Stung Treng.
I was dropped-off in front of a guesthouse on a street near the city square and street-market. The guesthouse had an open entrance into a sort-of lobby with some books and computers that didn’t work, some tables with dusty homemade menus. It was an old rustic sort of building, the kind that didn’t instil much confidence or expectation, but instead simple resignation, a deep breath saying okay, how dirty is it going to be? Fortunately for me, the room wasn’t the dirtiest I had been in so far, though it was certainly the ugliest. The bed was a dingy thing with speckle-white sheets, a mirror on the headboard so I could I watch myself having sex with invisible hookers, rusty-brown stains of blood coagulation, the remnants of someone getting their head blown off while watching themselves having sex with invisible hookers. The only upside was the bathroom didn’t smell like evil piss. Be thankful for what you got.
Before I wandered town till night, I decided to sit down at one of the wooden tables outside with a view of the river and the people walking around, playing hacky-sack in the street, and otherwise sitting around gambling and smoking and talking, riding by slow. The menu was written in Chinese, English, and Khmer. I wasn’t that hungry and was more or less just ordering food and a beer for the activity of eating and drinking and smoking and watching the golden glowing twilight of the river and the sunset streets. What else was there to do?
As I sat and waited for my meal to come, I looked at the message board on the wall next to my table. It was mostly just flyers for other guesthouses in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. I took note of one for Siem Reap called something Gardens. I didn’t bother writing it down. I was sure I would have no problem finding it, as if there were no other guesthouses ending with something-Gardens…
And then as my eyes continued to roam, there was one flyer, which caught my eye, as it was clearly graphically-designed to do. It said,
“PROTECT OUR CHILDREN FROM SEX CRIMES!!! IF YOU SEE …” and featured a shadowy photograph of a grown man and a little girl… in any case, it was subtle and illustrative.
It was similar to the big sign I had seen at the border. The sign encouraging people to report pedophiles if they saw any. They’re everywhere in Cambodia. Everyone knows that. It was only months ago, platinum-selling British-pop has-been Gary Glitter was reported in these parts, a frequenter of the Indochinese region for the young pretty girls. They kicked him out. But many more less famous than he still roaming. Report suspicious activity… as if it was that easy…
But then as I rolled my tongue in a mouth full of skepticism, I glanced at a table on the other side of the room. They were the only other people at the tables at that time, four middle-aged white men sitting by themselves waiting for their food. I saw them when I sat down obviously, but now something inside me stirred. I began to look at them with a deep burning passion of justice in my eyes. I felt The Diplomat rising…
Four middle-aged white men in Cambodia? Just taking in the sights, eh? Cut the crap. You make me sick…
It was the pancakes that convinced me. When they received their food, I stayed watching (secretly) the skinny one methodically slice and chew his pancakes. Drizzling the pancake syrup in slow perfect lines like the commercials, his knife pressing against the soft dough in perfect symmetrical triangles. It’s well-known that pedophiles are neat-freaks and control-freaks. Abusive child-hood, often abused for being messy as children… they hate filth, they hate it! Love giving children baths, the fucking perverts…
I watched him eating his pancakes slowly, chewing robotically, his eyes focused with the flavor of the maple syrup, the fucking bastard. The rest of them carried on casually as if thinking nothing of the shameful wrongs they would commit against innocent children to fulfil their dark desires. Coming to this land because of its weakness for money, its desperation, and the renowned beauty of its children. I wanted to choke the pancakes out of that motherfucker until Aunt Jemima came and slapped me two times. And even then I wouldn’t stop…
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to say something. I couldn’t just let these sick-fucks come into this country and defile the innocence of children. I wanted to smash the plates on their table and feed them the shards, the bastards. So I stood up and said something.
“You guys think it’s fine? Eh? Dinner’s good? Enjoying your dinner, eh?” I said transforming into The Diplomat, rounding their table, fingering their plates, dipping my fingers in the syrup and tasting it crudely in their faces.
“How are you guys enjoying your stay, hmm? Everything is nice? These shitty bedrooms holding up for you? Watch yourself fuck any little boys and girls in that mirror yet? Not before dinner, eh? How nice,” I said my hands now on their shoulders.
“I’ll give you guys five seconds, to get the fuck—”
Before I could finish my ultimatum of a proper Diplomat delivered ass-whipping, their wives came into the guesthouse and looked at me curiously, probably thinking I was the waiter. The Diplomat was shot; he was crawling on the bathroom floor, a trail of blood as the urinals overflowed…
“And, I recommend the soup! It’s excellent!”
I left before my food arrived.
I couldn’t return to the guesthouse until nightfall. I had arranged for a bus to Phnom Penh and then Siem Reap early in the morning. As long as they weren’t on the same bus, I would be spared the humiliation and blubbering apology that would surely follow. I spent the rest of the evening down by the river. There were lots of people there, cleaning up for the day. There were chickens tied up together and clucking under woven baskets. Small silvery fish laid out on piled lines. On the blue river, where the sun was now setting, the entire sky became blue twilight, and the river an even brighter shade of blue despite the depth of the sky. In the water was a man washing his motorbike with love and care, making sure it was polished, bright, and clean so he could ride with pride through these defeated streets. And then there were some naked boys dancing in the water, their mother giving them their bath in the same waters as the motorbike, the waters that gave them the silvery fish, the same waters that gave this small town with nothing just a little bit of something, that something that they had always had, that something that they would still have when everything else is gone. The old man sings of rivers…
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Alan Gould is an Australian poet, novelist and essayist. His seventh novel, The Lakewoman, was launched at The 2009 Melbourne Writers’ Festival, and his twelfth volume of poetry, Folk Tunes, has just been published by Salt. Among his many awards, he has won the NSW Premier’s Prize For Poetry (1981), The National Book Council Banjo Prize for Fiction (1992), The Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal For Literature, and The Grace Leven Award for his The Past Completes Me – Selected Poems 1973-2003.
The Mudda
Poets are born, they say, not made.
By the time of my own birth I was an over-cooked baby, having dallied in the interior of The Mudda for week after overcast week beyond the normal term. After such dalliance, little wonder my hankering to recover enchanted time.
So I, Claude Boon, begin by imagining The Mudda in that interval of my pre-birth. As my embryonic presence swelled her usually neat, Flemish frame it grew ungainly as a washtub, and needed to be hauled, ah, upstairs, uphill, upfront and upsadaisy, onto double-decker buses and into small black cars, and she, Boon-buoyant, Boon-weary, with the burden of me. Did she complain? I believe not. If she sat at table, I was a round under her grey smock like a great cheese remembered from the plenty of pre-war Holland. If she returned from wet Woolwich High Street where she had stood half an hour in the queue for a ration of sausages or liver, she felt my presence as a grapnel on her every fibre. Her patience, her resilience, were entering my character, as were some of the qualities of her Brabanter forbears, my clean complexion and open forehead, my good-natured nose and my eyes a little too trusting of the world, perhaps.
And if I pushed out my fist or my foot, how do I evoke the strangeness of her sensations? Here, did she sense it, was a live butterfly fluttering against the interior of a balloon, here was the gear-stick of a small black car pushed back and forth against her inner fabric?
‘Nou, we zullen zien wat er gaat gebeuren,’ she said, first in her own language to mask her impatience, then, to show politeness to the borough maternity nurse, ‘We must see what comes, of course.’
If the Mudda’s patience was sometimes tested, I appeared at ease with the situation. Through those weeks of the British winter and early spring I hunched in the placental tree-house, stem-fed by her magnificent system. Into my future flowed those exact proteins and vitamins she could extract from the spam, the herring, the dried egg of that tin-food era, the orange juice, rose hip syrup and extra allowance of milk allowed for this pregnancy by her green ration card. While the Pa beavered among his memos at the British War Office, I spent the day, either rocked asleep by the Mudda’s internal rhythms, or dreamily pushing that exploratory gear-stick against her womb wall.
Do embryos dream? Did my own lifelong attachment to reverie begin in the treehouse with some aural/maternal-fantasy? Is this where the protozoa of poems originate, for the muse is said to be a mother-figure.
Beglub-beglub pumped the Mudda’s heart, gloink, her intestinal plumbing eased itself, purrr, slid her blood along its Flemish conduits. Is it possible my proto-intellect was actually wired to the maternal dreaming during her final weeks of pregnancy in the Woolwich army quarter? From some trace-memory I possess, here is Mrs Boon dozing during the February afternoons, tiaras of raindrops agleam under the telegraph wires, while the scenes behind her eyelids show the imminent Boon, a spiked coronet on my round head that must surely tear her as I leave her. Then, in this phantasmagoria of a woman-with-child in a monarchic nation not her own, she watches as I grow away from her wounded body, recede to some altitude above her head like a gargoyle leering from the façade of one of those decorous, overbearing English cathedrals that her Englishman husband had shown her during his intervals of wartime leave.
Week to week, cell on cell, morula, blastocyst, trophoblast, from fertilised ovum to gargoyle I grew. Ears, limbs, testicles popped from me like mushrooms. Blood went beading along my arteries and capillaries; insulin was secreted; teeth aligned themselves below the gums in preparation for their future troublemaking. I gained the full human kit with the apparent exception of the will to move on from that original tree-house welfare state. So complacent was my attitude to being born, it was decided three weeks after my term I would need medical help to be induced into the world. Poeta nascitur, non fit.
While The Pa Read Milton
In fact I was not my parents’ first child, for there had been an elder sister, born at Dehra Dun in India in ’47 who survived only a few days. To safeguard my own emergence into the world therefore, it seems the Pa had arranged, at some expense, for Harley Street’s Sir John Cue to be at Mrs Boon’s side. Five months earlier, this obstetrician knight had assisted at the birth of the heir to the British throne, an attendance thought to give me an improved chance of safe arrival.
This may also account for the Mudda’s fantasy of my coronet, and in the longer term my sense of self-regard, this egotism materialising, as it were, at HRH favour.
My birth occurred at supper time on a March Friday in 1949 at one of the delivery rooms of the King’s College Hospital.
‘Hah, hah, hah,’ gasped the Mudda, who was a modest woman trying to recover her composure after a bodily event rather more public than she preferred. ‘Ferry kint, dank u wel.’
London’s Bow Bells did not ring for me, but outside the hospital window I gather the Thames sky did ooze a typical drizzle for this future minor Australian poet of the latter twentieth century. The 1949 streets were slimed with moisture as London families (like the Lucks of Third Avenue, Ilford) sat down to meals eked from whatever those green ration cards permitted; the spam, the rabbit pie, the dried egg scrambled to the insipid yellow of institutional soap, parsnip and cabbage boiled to a quattrocento artist’s corpse-pallor, or some originally orange winter vegetable similarly transmogrified.
On this, my opening night, the Pa sat halfway down the long corridor leading to the delivery room. He was, we must guess, without his supper. A well-thumbed, leather-bound volume was balanced on his knee and he looked up from his page only when he heard an ‘Ahem,’ and found the KBE with his case of medical instruments standing uncertainly before him. Having come directly from his desk at The War Office, my parent was still dressed in his service uniform, the tunic buttons glinting under the neon lights. Promptly he rose to attention in order to hear the obstetrician apprise him of the facts of my birth.
‘Colonel Boon,’ Sir John apparently chose his words, ‘You have become the parent of a somewhat serious-minded young fellow, if the first five minutes of a life are any guide.’
‘I am obliged to you,’ replied The Pa.
‘May I ask what you are reading?’ asked the knight.
‘I am reading the incomparable Milton.’
Keeping his finger in the page, the planet’s newest father held up the gold lettering on the spine of the book that it might be seen. The volume had accompanied the Pa during his war service with 43rd Division from Normandy to Bremerhaven so the tooled red leather of the cover was scarred by items, military and otherwise, that had chafed against it in one haversack or another during those eleven months of attritional European warfare.
‘I understand,’ replied the knight. ‘One is mindful at such moments as this of the need to touch the sublime.’
‘My feeling exactly,’ said the Pa.
‘Your wife is a foreigner, I see.’
‘Mrs Boon is Dutch, from Breda in the Northern Brabant.’
‘Just so,’ replied Sir John, (who perhaps felt he must disarm the Colonel’s tendency to over-explain when rank was an uncertainty in conversation). ‘Of course your son will be entitled to call himself a Cockney if he wishes. Earshot of the bells and so on.’
‘He will undoubtedly turn himself into something.’
‘Do you have in mind a name for the child?’
‘We have agreed on Claude Evelyn Boon.’
‘Claude from Claudius, just so. You have chosen stateliness there, I think.’ The knight rocked contemplatively back and forth on the balls of his feet. ‘And Evelyn!’ Sir John considered these syllables next.
‘As an obstetrician, you see, one takes an interest in names. Evelyn, Aveline, your choice here derives from the French word for the hazel which was a nut denoting wisdom in olden days, did you know?’
‘I did not. I am obliged to you for informing me.’
‘May I wish the very best to the three of you?’
‘You may indeed.’
At this the knight apparently took a step or two, then paused in his departure.
Let me pause to consider him. This person’s hands were the first to touch my own person. For some moments he would have cradled me, perhaps cleaned me, weighed me, and many years later, when I was intrigued by the remotest and smallest influences present in the formation of character, I was led to wonder what quiet influence those hands might have conferred upon me.
This was not altogether self-regarding whimsy on my part. Twenty-eight years later, in an encounter that was extraordinary for its casual coincidence, Boon, the babe now grown to youngish manhood, would meet and receive kindness at the hands of his obstetrician. That meeting must await its place in this story, but it would allow me to know that Sir John possessed a pleasant face, more that of a pastrymaker than a knight perhaps, and the upshot of this is that I am pleased by the thought of having come into the world where my first contact was a kindly stranger. The spring of natural charity in people has mystified me, and I will meet a diversity of kindly strangers in the travels that these pages record.
Now the knight, whose head would tremble a little as he struggled to express a perplexity, was confiding to the Pa. ‘And yet, you see, Colonel, if one only knew what that ‘best’ might include in these distracting times, Iron Curtains, atomic bombs and such palaver.’
The Pa, I should mention, was a staunch Cromwellian in outlook and therefore in the habit of providing answers that were to the purpose. Here before him was a figure of social rank who had mislaid that vital self-assurance proper to rank, particularly when it was needed to sustain morale in nuclear times.
‘One strives,’ the Pa delivered his view, ‘to give each child opportunity to discover such interests as may match a livelihood and that this match should please a commonwealth.’
Did this grandiloquence belong more to the floor of The House Of Commons than a chat in a hospital corridor? My Pa was perhaps more parliamentary than colloquial in his relations with both me, and all his acquaintance. His work in military education, and his papers on disadvantaged learners lay behind this conviction.
‘Just so,’ Sir John shifted on his feet.
And now there was an awkward pause, as of two men who might strike up an acquaintance could they fathom each other’s tone. Then they shook hands and Sir John receded down the corridor while the new father stood under the icy lights wondering whether he might now put aside the incomparable Milton to visit Mrs Boon. Along that corridor there may have been other delivery rooms producing other 1949 children, but no one intruded upon the colonel’s own small dilemma on that spot of linoleum.
For my Pa was a gentlemanly colonel, divided between his knowledge that there were matters to face and his decent uncertainty as to whether it was proper for the paternal person to end the mother’s privacy quite so early after that mysteriously female event of a birth. Resolving against doubt, and slipping Milton into his briefcase, the Pa set out for the door to the delivery room.
(from The Poets’ Stairwell, a picaresque novel-in-progress.)
Michelle Murray explores identity and the space where her Scottish/Australian heritage merges with the land and culture of the Simpson Desert Channel Country . After acting college Michelle packed a swag and a bag to live on the edge of the desert with her husband who is descended from the Arabana people. They lived together on Wangkamadla (Bedourie) and Wangkangurru/Yarluyandi (Birdsville) country before moving to rural South Australia where Michelle has an Alexandrina Council artist residency at Goolwa. Michelle is an independent writer/performer. ‘Skeleton Woman’ was originally produced for Onkaparinga Council’s Double Vision art exhibition in October 2011.
