On the Port Keats Road by Mark Smith

June 11, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Mark Smith is an educator, writer and surfer (not necessarily in that order) living on Victoria’s West Coast. In the last 12 months he has had stories published in Visible Ink, Offset and Headspring. He has been long-listed for the Fish Prize in Ireland and, most recently, won the EJ Brady Short Story prize for a story entitled Milk For India. (This story was awarded second prize in the FAW National Literary Awards short story category). Unlike every other writer on the planet, he is not working on a novel – or at least he is not telling anyone if he is.

The road ribbons out in front of T-Bone. He looks over the steering wheel and shields his eyes from the sun reflecting off the bonnet. All the straight lines, the metal, the fences, the wire, the hot nights on his bench, all of them behind him now and ahead of him his mother’s country.

Viewed from above, the old Hi-Lux ute is a piece of dull metal pushing slowly west, a vast plume of dust erupting with its passing. After the river crossing the road runs straight for twenty kilometres before it elbows south, corrects itself and heads toward the distant coast. The river curls around behind it like a great snake before it fans out to cover the flood plain. The lush trees and grasses cling to its bank, a green skin slithering between the stony ridges that lead to the dry heart of the continent.

For eight months all T-Bone has thought about is driving west along the Port Keats Road, steering a course between the sharp rocks and the bulldust on the shoulder.

Jimmy sits in the passenger seat of the Hi-Lux. He clings to the handle above the door and braces his body against the constant vibration.  The car’s suspension is shot and the column shift is held in fourth by an occy strap that comes up through a hole in the floor.  Every now and again he drinks from a water bottle and passes it to his nephew. T-Bone takes it without looking and gulps quick mouthfuls. Occasionally a tourist’s neat and shiny four-wheel drive passes the other way and fills the cabin with dust. T-Bone eases to the side to let them through then guns the ute into the billowing cloud they leave in their wake.

T-Bone is comfortable with distance. He grew up in the back of cars and utes riding high in the hot breeze or swaddled in blankets at night with his brothers, his cousins, his uncles and aunts. His family was always going somewhere. A football match at Adelaide River, a music festival in Darwin or out to shoot geese on Lizzy Downs station. As a child he tried to memorise the road, looking for the washouts and cutaways that spaced themselves between home and Daly River. Each journey threw up a new marker, a burned out wreck, a swath cut through dreaming country by a new pipeline or a turn-off to a camp that only the old women could see. He looked where they pointed, noting the lean of a particular tree or the shape of a termite mound. He found a place for them in the map in his head that slowly filled the gap between what he wanted to know and what the old people knew. Now he marked the stages of his journey home by these landmarks and the memories they held.

Jimmy had barely spoken since he picked up T-Bone in Darwin. He had driven overnight and arrived in the near-empty car park just as the sun crested the walls and caught the wire. Exhausted, he lay down across the seat and fell asleep, covering his face with his hat to cut out some of the light. T-Bone opened the door and stood in the glare. He carried a large duffle bag over one shoulder and smaller bag jammed under his arm. He wedged them behind the seat and tapped his uncle lightly on the leg.

Jimmy didn’t move but spoke from underneath his hat. ‘What kept ya?’

T-Bone smiled, ‘Bin waitin’ long?’

‘Eight months or so,’ Jimmy replied, tilting the hat off his face.

‘Sorry Uncle. Would’ve come out earlier if I’d known.’

‘Still a cheeky bastard then.’

Jimmy sat up and looked at his nephew as he slid in behind the wheel. ‘You put on weight,’ he said before he rested his head against the side column and dropped the hat over his eyes again. He didn’t wake until they were well clear of the city’s outskirts, with only the occasional petrol station to interrupt the monotony of the flat scrubland. The radio was on and T-Bone was driving one-handed, the other hanging out the side window, trailing in the breeze.

‘What was it like in there T?’ Jimmy asked.

T-Bone looked straight out at the road and mouthed the words to the country song that was playing through the one working speaker. He had thoughts for what it was like, but not words. He couldn’t describe how it had emptied him out, broken him open and left him hollow. He wanted to tell his uncle how at first he’d dreamed in colour, the rich green of country after the wet, the dark purple of those big storm heads in the build up, the red and yellow flash of black cockatoos taking off. But slowly the colour had drained away to grey, then nothing. No dreaming, just restless sleep with the sweat trickling off him on to the mattress. He’d spent days at a time in there trying to remember things that didn’t have a place anymore. He couldn’t remember the sound the rain made when it hit the river or how it changed the way it smelled, the way it moved.

‘Food was okay. Three meals a day. Didn’t have to do no cooking,’ he replied.

They stopped at the Daly crossing in the harsh midday light of the dry season. The grey-green river eddied and spilled under the crossing, making its way down under the new bridge that would open up the road right through the wet season. They sat in the shadows up on the high bank and ate the bread and jam they’d bought at the Adelaide River truck stop. T-Bone spread his toes through the coarse sand, burying them up to his ankles. Then he walked down to the water.

‘You watch out for those crocs,’ warned Jimmy.

‘Not worried ‘bout no crocs Uncle,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘They better watch out for me though.’

T-Bone cupped his hands in the water, splashed his face and ran cool fingers through his hair. He was coming into his mother’s country and he wanted his sweat to flow down the river and announce his return, to fan out across the flood plain and let those magpie geese and turtles know he was back. He knew the barramundi would tell his story all the way down to the sea, passing the word on when they rested in the deep billabongs, swimming his name back out into the current where the salt water mixed with the fresh. The water loosened T-Bone’s limbs and quelled a little of the restlessness that had been building in him as his release date had approached. He felt as though he had been holding his breath for weeks. He sat on his haunches and allowed himself a smile only the river could see.

Back in the car they crossed the dry spillway and accelerated up the steep grade on the other side. The country levelled out again and the road broadened, wide enough now for five cars. They passed the turn-off to the mango farm and the fishing camp down river. T-Bone took the tobacco pouch from his shirt pocket and rolled a cigarette one-handed, sealing it with a quick lick of his tongue. He sat it between his lips and pushed the lighter into the dashboard. It sprang out and he lit his cigarette. Seeing a mob of startled wallabies bounding for cover he braced the steering wheel with his knees and, holding an imaginary rifle in his hands, made a cracking sound with his tongue and exhaled smoke from his nostrils.

Jimmy looked at him and smiled. He had forgotten how young his nephew was. T-Bone gave him a sheepish grin and quickly turned away.

‘I forgot all those stories in there Uncle; all those stories Mum told us. Y’know, the ones about the brolga and that old pelican. The turtle and the porcupine. I tried real hard to remember ‘em but I couldn’t. I lost ‘em in there, somewhere in the corners and the walls. I lost ‘em and couldn’t remember ‘em.’

Jimmy looked straight ahead and nodded.

‘You lonely in there T?’ He asked.

‘I felt sick for home the whole time Uncle. Sick for family.’

‘Family missed you the whole time T. Your Mum says you took ‘er heart in there with you. Reckons she hasn’t been able to breathe proper since you been away. She on dialysis now too. Twice a week’

‘She can’t breathe it’s more likely those smokes I reckon. Shouldn’t be smokin’ at her age,’ he said, flicking his cigarette out onto the road.

T-Bone returned his attention to the wheel ruts tracking through the sand and rocks. He thought about the last time he had seen his mother. She had travelled up to Darwin for the court case, slept with the long-grassers and arrived late. He looked for her in the thin crowd but the proceedings began before she got there. He struggled to answer any of the questions because he had no one there to look at. He stared at the floor and said ‘I don’t remember.’ The copper read the charges in a tired voice, his uniform pulling tightly across his belly and his hat on the table in front of him.

T-Bone didn’t hear the sentence but when the guard took him by the arm his mother called out from the back of the room. She spoke in language and the words followed him back down the stairs and into the cells where they got lost in the shouting and noise. ‘You come home now,’ she said. ‘You come home.’

The road flattened out, the blue-green escarpment up towards Emu Plains growing out of the horizon. T-Bone drove with the window open, filling his lungs with the smells of the country. As they approached a track heading off to their left he slowed and pulled the ute to the side of the road.

‘What you doin’ T?’ Jimmy asked.

‘Gotta drop somethin’ off for that Pidji mob. Meet someone here.’ He didn’t know how they would know to be there. It was one thing he’d learned in the last eight months, the things he didn’t need to think about.

He braked slowly and brought the car to a stop, leaving the engine idling. When the dust settled they saw an old man and woman sitting under a yellow-box tree at the side of the track. They waited.  The old woman ate from a packet of chips and looked past them to the other side of the road. The old man raised his hand, the palm flat, then tilted it from side to side. ‘What?’ It said.

‘Name T-Bone,’ he called. ‘Got a bag for that Pidji mob. Belongs to the boy who passed on.’

The old man grabbed at a low branch of the yellow-box and climbed to his feet. He stood with his hands in the small of his back and rocked forward a little. He might have been fifty or seventy, his brow covered by a felt hat and his mouth hidden behind a grey beard. He stood there swaying for a while then shuffled over to the car.

‘You got a smoke?’ He asked.

T-Bone handed him his packet of rollies. The old man fumbled with the papers and rolled a thin cigarette. Jimmy and T-Bone watched silently as he took a box of matches out of his pocket, cupped his hands and lit the cigarette. He inhaled and began to cough, leaning over and spitting a lump of phlegm into the dirt.

When he had drawn enough breath to speak he leaned into the car and asked, ‘You know ‘im in there? That boy?’

T-Bone paused, then replied, ‘Sorry Old Man. I didn’t know that boy. The priest, that Father Michael bloke, he give me this bag here and says if I can drop it off for that Pidji mob.’

He reached behind the seat and pulled out the small bag with Adidas written on the side. He passed it through the window to the old man who took it with his right hand and pushed the packet of rollies into his top pocket with his left. He held the bag in his hands for a moment, as though weighing its importance, then walked back, took hold of the low branch of the yellow box to balance himself and dropped it next to the old woman. She undid the zip and emptied the contents into the dirt – a couple of shirts, a pair of black shorts, a bright red and yellow football jumper, a cigarette lighter and a small toiletries bag. She looked back up at Jimmy and T-Bone for a long minute then pushed the items back into the bag, along with her chips and a soft-drink bottle. She reached up and the old man helped her to her feet. Without a word they turned and started walking up the track. The woman hugged the bag to her chest.

T-Bone found first gear and revved the motor. He eased back out onto the road then pushed the accelerator to the floor. He didn’t look in the rear-view mirror.

T-Bone tried not to think about the boy. He had arrived just after the wet started and because they’d known T-Bone’s country was near his they had put them together. The boy had been sentenced to two years for a couple of burglaries in Darwin. They caught him when he found a slab of beer in a garage and rather than carry it away he decided to drink it there. He passed out in the backyard and woke in the police van. All of this T-Bone had drawn out of him over weeks. He was shy around the older boys and T-Bone looked out for him. He’d never had to fight for him but there had been a couple of times he had to make his presence felt. The boy would barely speak during the day but after lights out, in the comfort and safety of the dark, he’d talk about his family and football.

‘I got a big chance being drafted if I wasn’t in ‘ere,’ he said one night. ‘Move down to Adelaide and live with my uncle. He played fifty games with West Torrens. Reckons he could get me start.’

T-Bone had never heard him talk like this. He couldn’t see the boy in the dark but he could hear his foot tapping rhythmically on the end of the bunk.

‘What position you play?’ He asked.

‘Anywhere I can run. I got some pace. My uncle he says I run like a rabbit. Play on the wing most times. Plenty of room to run.’

T-Bone had stayed quiet then. He knew two years inside would kill off any chance of the boy’s dream being realised. The next week he found him in the laundry, with all that dark blood on the stainless steel bench and his clothes soaked in it. He was propped up against the back wall, his arms limp by his side, the gashes along his forearms pulsing blood down over his hands to the floor. At first T-Bone couldn’t look at his face, just the chipped nails on his toes and thick soles of his feet. He didn’t know what else to do so he took his shirt off and started to bind the boy’s wrists. Then he wiped the sticky blood on his shorts and went to raise the alarm.

As they drove further west it seemed to T-Bone that the land was wider than he remembered, the horizon more distant, the sky more blue. In that place the only thing he could be certain of was the sky, the big emptiness of it, but even that ended in coiled wire. He took to standing in the middle of the yard and cupping his hands either side of his face, creating a blue window bordered by skin. Occasionally a bird flew into his hole in the sky, a brown kite or a cockatiel. He would be tempted to follow it but he knew it would end in the wire. So he learned to let them pass through, temporary visitors in his half real, half imagined world. One day at the start of the dry season, T-Bone felt someone standing beside him in the yard. He turned to look at the boy. His hands were cupped at the side of his face and his head was tilted towards the sky. T-Bone couldn’t see his mouth but now, two hundred kilometres away and going home, he liked to think that maybe he was smiling.

With the shuddering and swaying of the Hi Lux along the Port Keats Road, he was putting distance between himself and everything back there, his cell, the concrete, the boy. He felt the grit of dirt between his teeth and saw the dust falling on his skin. He ran his hand along his arm and pushed it into his pores.

High above, a Wedgetail peels off toward the arteries of the Fish River. The Hi Lux is holding sway over the red ribbon road, inching its way closer to the wider expanse of the ocean. The great green snake of the Daly is lost in the haze of heat lifting off the land and filling the air. The word of T-Bone’s return is passing all the way down the river to the sea.

Norebang by Genevieve L Asenjo

June 9, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Genevieve L. Asenjo is Honorary Fellow in the Fall 2012 International Writing Program (IWP) of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, USA. Author of four books, she writes poetry, fiction, and novel in three Philippine languages and directs Balay Sugidanun (House of Storytelling), an online platform on Mother Tongue. She teaches literature and creative writing at De La Salle University in Manila, Philippines.

She arrived as a guest and departed as an accomplice to a crime, after sitting down to a dinner of pinakbet and sinigang with the Kim family.

            At least, that’s what she tells me in between mouthfuls of peanuts and potato chips. We are at Janga Norebang in Koejong.

            Listen. One night in this Korean family’s typical apartment in Busan, tap water was gushing from the faucet onto the sink. There was something being washed, something boiling, something being cooked into pinakbet and sinigang. Presiding over this, all at the same time, was Neneng Delia, the Filipina wife of a Korean.

Look at her, that guest I mentioned who is beside me right now, sitting at the table around the corner from the sink and stove where Neneng remained standing. Across from her, on the other side of the table, sat the Korean, the husband. On the other end, the remaining half of the room. On display were a digital TV and framed pictures of the Kim family wearing hanbok, the traditional attire worn during celebrations like Chuseok, the harvest festival. There was a piano. Eight-year-old Ji-eun was playing a tune she recognized, Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.”

Anyway, she continues, she kept on glancing at Neneng. She was convinced of the woman’s beauty; more so before, but even until now, with that face worthy of a celebrity, her long hair and curvaceous body. In her black slacks and blue floral blouse, the woman looked her age, well past forty-five. She tells me those glances were a plea for help, she was listening to the woman’s husband, who was speaking to her—eye to eye—in phrases which Neneng quickly translated into English, some into a mix of Tagalog and Hiligaynon.

Such as: ‘My husband says you’re pretty. Bakit daw I’m not more like you?’

She says she then felt the crushing of tomatoes, of squash, of okra in her chest. Even persimmon, which she had first seen in this country and delighted in.

But she says she understands Neneng, all the more now. It’s why she had invited us here. The thing is, Neneng couldn’t come. Not even belatedly, like the others. They say they’re almost here.

Neneng and I have known each other for five years. We have this group of English teachers who married Koreans here in Busan. I know her husband too, Leo (his English name). Bald, a little pudgy. Smiles a lot. I can imagine his face, his eyes turning into slits as he talked to this girl. There are some people for whom a smile is the equivalent of a hello, and perhaps on that night, since his wife was again cooking pinakbet and sinigang, out of joy at having met another Filipina friend, because of that, everything was okay between them. This, despite reports from the group that her husband had been laid off by the shipping company. Despite the fact that some days Ji-eun came home from school to complain that her classmates were teasing her: ‘Nunon african saram ida. Pibuga sikumota!’ (You are African. Your skin is dark!)

They had met on the subway, Neneng and this girl, whom I first encountered during Independence Day this year; she had been in my Pandanggo sa Ilaw dancing group. The two of them shared the same route—Sinpyeong, Hadan, Tangni, Saha, Koejong, Seomyeon—and the same work hours: 10 in the morning until 6 in the evening. Their hagwon stood near each other. ‘Come over to my house,’ the woman had eagerly invited, ‘I’ll cook pinakbet and sinigang for you.’ Turned out they were both Ilonggo, and anyway how could she decline an invitation from an older Filipina, especially one involving such scrumptious dishes? Was she also a wife? No, she had answered, a new recruit actually, here to struggle after two years of tutoring Korean students in Iloilo. Her seaman boyfriend had gotten another girl pregnant. Geu saram, she had said, her drama here would involve fixing a broken heart.

Song: (그 사람) Geu Saram/That Person

Artist: Lee Seung Chul

This was how she got me here. She has already memorized it from watching Baker King. Another can of beer each, another plate of peanuts, then we play the song.

‘Saranghae, I also love my husband,’ I tell her. ‘Love can be developed too, that’s not just for photos.’

Hahahaha.

Hehehehe, she adds.

‘Yes, my shi-omoni is nice enough. But of course mothers-in-law always treat you like a maid, especially during Chuseok.’ I down my beer and signal for another one.

Something else happened during that visit, she adds. After dinner, after Neneng finished washing and cleaning up, still in her black slacks and blue floral blouse and still refusing her help, they had norebang on the digital TV in the living room.

            Here’s the scenario. The girl, sitting over there. The Korean, on the floor beside his daughter, in his shorts and t-shirt. And Neneng? She’s the one holding the microphone, crooning and swaying to “Bakit” by Imelda Papin.

            Clap, clap, clap.

            Neneng’s husband was very amused. Imagine Neneng’s long hair shimmying to the rhythm of her curvy body, as if she was not the Neneng we earlier saw cooking and translating her husband’s compliments to this girl: that she’s probably very smart because she had managed to come to Korea even without a Korean boyfriend or husband, that if he and Neneng were divorced, or if he was wealthy, he would woo her and take her to Jeju Island, where he once traveled for work, and where well-heeled Koreans go for vacations.

            She says she replied, as a plea to Neneng to change the topic, that there are many beautiful seas in the Philippines, which is why many Koreans go there, when was the last time they had a vacation, or when will they go for one?

            Apparently she sweated so much that night, that if it had gone on she would have developed rashes. The daughter’s playing the piano as her parents were committing a crime! All this because she turned up. This knowledge pinned her to her seat. There was some illicit irony in what was happening in that household at that moment: she had to help Neneng amuse a husband who’d recently lost his job, she had to be there as both viewer and witness to Neneng’s Koreanovela, because indeed what else was she to do in this country, unmarried?

Yes, she understands now, this was why Neneng had invited her, not just because they’re from the same country, or perhaps precisely because of that, the woman saw her as the perfect accomplice (the word ‘victim’ seems too harsh). So then, Neneng was able to sing her heart out, to croon and sway seemingly without a care for today or tomorrow because, isn’t it true, her husband and daughter adored her in those moments, and as for her presence there, a fellow Filipina who might give ridicule or insult, so what? You too, her swaying seemed to say, you too will experience this strange sorrow and loneliness when the trees start shedding their leaves, you too will sob during nights and mornings as if someone had hewn into a part of your throat, as if someone had stolen your gold, and you will remain restless until you take a gulp of sinigang. This will repeat itself, through the four cycles of seasons; will be veiled by busyness but will never disappear, so that you too will say yes, it’s still better in the Philippines, especially in the province, it really is good, unlike anything else, but your life will no longer be there. So you will sing popular songs, undying songs like those popularized by Imelda Papin, and dance, sway, without a care in the world, even if you get shot like those in the reported cases of “My Way.”

            She says they ended the night with “Hindi Ako Isang Laruan.”

‘Let’s just sing,’ I want to tell her. This girl is too sharp, I have to call up the others we’ve been waiting for. We can hardly hear each other over the noise, but I get that the three of them are already walking towards us, they can see the signboard.

Listen, haaaay…

I have memorized the usual schedule of a Korean’s Filipina wife: after hagwon, hurry to another teaching commitment, for example a private tutorial for older people who want to learn English, or else run to the market or fetch the child or go home to clean and launder and cook. At night, help the child with homework, keep the husband company as he watched TV, regale him in bed. We’d be lucky to have the occasional norebang together. Like now.

I wonder if this girl understands that although Neneng and I have different situations, I too can only leave the house, my work and husband and two children, for guests? This is what I told my husband, our group has a Filipina visitor—her, this girl, and since I am the President I have to arrange things. But my husband is kind anyway, he’s an engineer.

Go on listening, because I can no longer keep myself from talking. ‘Of course there’s a lot of suffering at first, especially in getting along with shi-omoni,’ I tell her. ‘It’s as if you had stolen her child, plus you don’t know Korean and she’s not good in English, and she thinks you’re an idiot in the kitchen. It’s important that you know how to fight back. That’s what I teach my two sons. Even if they don’t get teased in school like Ji-eun. But back then, it’s like they were ashamed that their classmates would see me, that they would find out I’m their mother!’

Come on, she says as “Gue Saram” starts up again.

We say cheers with our third cans of beer. I sing this, one of my early favorites, this song that surrenders the loved one, that says go on, leave, be with her instead, because I love you.

Then the door opens. Here come three more Koreans’ wives.

            Which came first, song or story? Or are they the same thing? Is it the allure of a new acquaintance, of someone young? Or is it because we simply want to listen to ourselves?

            ‘That’s just paper,’ someone says about switching citizenships, ‘but if we didn’t become
citizens, if we didn’t get listed, well pity our children, pity us, we wouldn’t receive benefits and our children wouldn’t have any rights.’

‘So think carefully before you marry a Korean,’ another says jokingly, even though it’s true. She knows we have a tendency to become dramatic during these get-togethers.

There’s also someone else who stays quiet all the time. Who prefers to eat peanuts and potato chips and prepare playlists.

             We do not talk anymore about Neneng and the other Filipinas in the group. We only have one hour left before we need to go home. We belt out everything from ABBA to K-pop, to “Ang Pasko ay Sumapit,” grinding and wiggling—but no splits.

            Something else happened that night. Just then, for the very first time, we did something that might even erase the girl’s memory of that night at Neneng’s: we sang “Ang Bayan Ko.”

            One refrain, without videoke accompaniment, and then we laughed and laughed afterwards like a bunch of lunatics, hugging each other all around. The plate of peanuts and potato chips fell to the floor, along with a bag and a few empty cans of beer. Tears also fell like kimchi that had been stored in a jar and was now being served up wholeheartedly to be tasted and judged. This was also my crime that night. The girl had been the instigator, accomplice, witness. But I know we’re all absolved, because I’m sure this girl expects it, awaits it, just as we did during our first time here, like the coming of snow.

Translated from Filipino by Michelle T. Tan

Michelle T. Tan is currently taking up an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where she was awarded the Southeast Asian Bursary. She graduated from the Ateneo de Manila University in 2011. She has been published in the Philippines Graphic and Philippines Free Press and her short story “Her Afternoon Lives” won Second Place in the 2012 Nick Joaquin Literary Awards.

Eggs by Anna Trembath

June 9, 2013 / mascara / 0 Comments

Anna Trembath is a Melbourne-based writer with homes in other places dear to her – Timor-Leste and Uganda. She received joint first place in the 2012 Perilous Adventures Short Story Competition, and her work has been published in Perilous Adventures, Peril, Birdville and Arena magazines.

Occasionally I still daydream that greeting the dawn may be the key to redemption. I see early morning mindfulness and sunrise namastes. I envisage reviving ocean dips, the saltwater’s surface flecked with colour like a neo-Impressionist painting. Meditation music intones, birds croon, the bay rocks back and forth, gently shush-shushing. The Melbourne morning seaside of my imagination smells like the waves have licked and lapped everything clean. It positively reeks of a fresh start.

Only twice a year am I awake early enough for all that inner peace malarkey. There is a cruel humour about this unsuitable timing. For eight years now, my sleep routine has been almost perfectly consistent, if dysfunctional. Laptop beside me, having worked on my photos and blog, I finally fall asleep in the blue-black hours of the morning. Like a sleep-surfer, I must ride oblivion at the precise point, just as the swell begins to curl into itself. I wake as late as my day’s plans allow.

This is my nocturnal routine, with the exception of two nights every year. For eight years, I have not slept at all during the hours of darkness where Christmas Day fizzles and dies, and where one year meets the next.

At dawn this morning, the first of January 2013, I trudged along the St Kilda sand. I could not conjure even a little smugness about this. The quiet was not healing. My soul did not sing. I was not wearing loose white linen, sporting flowing tresses and circling, arms out and head thrown back in ecstasy. Instead, the ocean was listless, waiting for something or someone more impressive than I. The intermittent wind whipped me half-heartedly. The heavens were grimy with the city’s muck. Something stank, probably a festering dog crap buried in the sand. Remnants of yesterday’s mascara found welcoming bedfellows in the dark shadows of my eyes, my overgrown fringe was greasy, and last night’s pumpkin soup had left orange drips on my shirt.

Turning back to home, I stepped onto the bike path tracing the shore. A passing cyclist swerved and yelled back at me over his shoulder. I watched his angry calves pump up and down as he disappeared.

It was all fitting. Honest. What I deserve.

Now the pair nestles in the cool round indent. Nudging up against one another at their points of greatest girth, they are smaller than a chicken’s, creamy, ovular and warm. This time there is no speckled imperfection.

The eggs’ halfway house is carefully chosen, a simple Johnson Brothers bowl. It is a colour officially called Grey Dawn, which is actually more a dusky blue. The bowl’s edges arc into four segments, these china petals curving upwards.

Offset by the potted miniature cactus sitting behind, the bowl and eggs remind me of evolvulus arizonicus, a tiny blue flower with a white ovary. On our honeymoon hike in the Sonoran Desert, I had found the Wild Dwarf Morning-glory. When I pointed out the delicate and unexpected thing at our feet, Henry barely looked down. He resented the interruption to his gaze upon the sweeping landscapes ahead and the skies above. The momentum of one foot in front of another was what he wanted.

The still-life arrangement of bowl, eggs and cactus is aglow with the morning sun. If I were looking through my camera’s viewfinder, the scene would be perfect for my blog. The waiting rubbish bin below the kitchen bench would go unseen. But I am not going to shoot this.

Yesterday I swept the balcony and made it inviting with throw rugs, cushions and candles. Here, in this mindful space, she gathers the scattered parts of herself, my blog would read. The photos would followed by a homebrewed chai tea recipe prepared with fair trade ingredients and a snippet about the importance of honey and bees to the ecological system. Somehow, in preparing my New Year’s Day ritual space, I had missed the dying yucca tucked into a balcony corner. I’d only been keeping the plant for its blue pot deathbed, a heavy, glossed ceramic thing. Perhaps in my indecision about choosing something with which to replace the perishing plant, I had deliberately ignored it. Perhaps it was shame, for who manages to kill something so utterly lacking in need?

It was only this morning, returning from my walk, that I noticed it. I had not realised that I was sharing the balcony. I don’t want to, don’t want the mess and imposition of it. The last time this happened, I could not use my balcony for months, in case I made them nervous.

With an eighth of my vegan no-cheese cheesecake and a shiny coffee table book about landscape architecture in Bali homes, I settle into my own private outdoor/indoor area. Ahead of me, yet another batch plummet down the rollercoaster. More white paint peels off rickety timber tracks and a watercolour sky swallows the screams. Beyond, the smiling bay is now sparkly, razzle-dazzle, lit up to impress.

Here I will wait for her.

I know how images can be manipulative. Glossy recipe books contain my images of food that is, in reality, oil-brushed, fluorescent-lit, steaming with hot soaking cotton balls, doused in Photoshopped hyper-colour. Selling a dream, my editors say. Preserving a moment in time that is unreal or ephemeral, before the inevitable decline and destruction, before the next desire sets in. My online profiles of foodies in their carefully-curated creative spaces play to envy. Hipster vegans and organic-obsessed hippies leading delicious, responsible, on-trend lives. Women embracing a repackaged domesticity; men revered for meeting the minimal standard of knowing how to cook, no matter their narcissism or casual objectification of women.

While anxious aesthetes attempt to overcome alienation through Instagram filters, in less coveted postcodes, asylum seekers eke out tasteless charity offcasts and the working class gets fat on takeaway. On a popular television culinary competition, the sole non-white face belongs to a woman born in Eritrea. She is initially lauded for the authenticity of her spiced dishes, and accompanying cultural stories are demanded of her. Later, she is dismissed for insufficiently reproducing that Aussie-forgotten-hyphened-Anglo classic—the pavlova.

Before what happened, I may have bought the basic premise, if not the petty particularities, of white middle class foodie taste. Now this pretentious shell of cultural representation that I inhabit is simply a means to an end; somewhere to pass the time, exhausted, while I wait for the nothingness.

On the day that we left the hospital, the thirtieth of December 2005, the park looked postcard-ready. The beclouded sky of the previous week had fought its way to blue freedom. Some teenagers threw themselves off a yellow cliff face into green and brown-gold waters below. I could hardly bear to look as I could see the shallow bottom of the river right near them, and I wanted to shake the adults urging the kids on. But they knew precisely the point from which to launch, exactly where to land.

We passed in cool forests with mossy stone carvings through to hills a show-off shade of green. Crossing a bridge slicing the pond in half, some guy standing on the hill above us snapped the scene. Just a few minutes earlier he had been lying prone on the banks, like a satire of a wildlife photographer. The ducks were unsure of how to act, perplexed by the attention. When I saw the amateur pointing his thing at us, I hid my face behind Henry.

Perhaps, from a wide-angle viewpoint, we looked normal. Perhaps the photographer even thought that our trio – woman, man, small boy – perfected the pretty scene. If he had zoomed in, visual glitches would have emerged. The man wore a brace curled around his right hand, extending to a mid-point between wrist and elbow. The woman was alarmingly bony, with black eyes, a broken lip, and three tiny plaster strips like train tracks on her forehead. Only with the child was there nothing apparently amiss. Between running off to inspect this and that, the boy would return to pull at one of the woman’s hands. But it was the man who spoke to the child’s chubby upturned face, smiling and entertaining his little wonders.

What the camera could not have seen was the shadow, the lack. Sometimes the man reached for the woman’s free hand, but she would let it drop.  

On New Year’s Eve 2005, I lay curled on the Hamilton motel floor, watching my youngest son play with a soft toy given to him by a nurse. Strange, he did not seem to compute Toby’s absence, and yet he idolised his older brother. I was relieved that Toby was—had been—kind to Elijah. Even just after Eli’s birth, there had been no sign of jealousy in the three-year-old. Toby had marvelled at his baby brother, tenderly stroking his tiny nose, ears and toes, smiling down into that alert little face. Eli, in turn, had crawled and walked well before schedule, just to ensure he could be with Toby at all times. He had cried when Toby began school, and was always dizzy with excitement upon the afternoon return of his hero.

And yet now he did not even ask after his missing brother. Perhaps it was some protective block in his little brain. Or maybe he was taking cues from his father about how to be a man, how to suppress and conceal, a how-to guide to masculine shut-down stoicism. Henry was getting on with the job of fathering Eli, and he not uttered a word of blame in my direction. In fact, he had been carefully striking a balance between tenderness, matter-of-factness and levity with me, trying to prevent any outbursts or even mentions around Eli. The previous day, Henry had been the one who had insisted we go to the park, when all I wanted to do was draw the curtains on the motel room and pull the floral bed covers over my head. I nurtured the anger that Henry should have felt towards me and directed it back at him. Eli was just Eli, as loving and contented as always, and yet without his favourite person. It all confounded me.

During the day, I had carefully arranged a few of my things into a small backpack, slowly so as not to draw Henry’s attention or Eli’s questions. And then, when I was sure that they were asleep, I dressed in the bathroom, and left my envelope there next to the sink. It felt like a cliché, leaving a note, but how could I not? Even though it would be the last time that I saw them, I did not dare to kiss them.

 There was no longer any rental car to drive the hour or so to Auckland, and in any event I had decided never to drive again. I sat outside in the dark and called a taxi. When we passed the spot where it had happened on Christmas Day, I lifted my feet off the floor, remembering some childhood stories about graveyards and the dead. Changing my ticket at the airline desk, I explained that the others would board the original flight to Melbourne, but that there would be two, rather than three.

I have counted thirty-nine rollercoaster rotations by the time she arrives. As she flies in, she spots me and appears to veer slightly in the air, unsure for a split-second of whether to continue. Plain, without the iridescent breast and underwing feathers of the male pigeon, I would describe her colour as Grey Dawn.  She lands on the railing, just about at the yucca, and then hops down to the nest.

            It is empty.

            I watch her skip back up onto the railing, take flight and disappear. Perhaps she is checking that she has the right balcony. Returning quickly, she walks around the nest a little, nodding down into it, before settling to its side. She does not look at me. We both gaze across the bay.

            In the kitchen, the eggs have cooled.