A Small Dead Thing by Luke Johnson
Luke Johnson lectures in Creative Writing and Literary Theory at the University of Technology, Sydney, and the University of Wollongong. His stories have appeared in numerous journals, and in 2014 he was shortlisted for the Josephine Ulrick Prize. He has a PhD in Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory and Creative Writing from UTS.
A Small Dead Thing
Each morning Raymond’s father passes Raymond in his car on his way through to work. Often he slows down to call to the boy to hurry along now or to remember to look both ways. There is only one road between the house and the school anyway and of course Raymond knows all about looking both ways and not dawdling: he is seven years old now.
This morning when Raymond’s father leaves for work he drives from the house right past the front gates of the school without passing Raymond. When he reaches his work he calls the house to tell Raymond’s mother that he did not pass the boy on the way.
‘You did not pass him?’ Raymond’s mother says.
‘I’m sure it does not mean anything,’ Raymond’s father says, altering the tone in his voice.
‘God, what does it mean you did not pass him then, Harold?’ Raymond’s mother is not taken in by adjusted voice tones.
‘At most it means you should give the school a call to make certain he’s there. Of course he’s there. That’s all it means.’
‘God,’ Raymond’s mother says. ‘God, Harold.’
‘Look, Gloria, I can’t talk. It’s hell in here. Just ring me back if he hasn’t arrived at the school. Okay? I’m sure it does not mean anything. Most likely it means he took a shortcut through the creek again. I’m sure that’s all it means. I can’t talk. It’s busy as hell. Just ring me back, okay?’
Raymond’s father hangs up the phone and leaves Raymond’s mother standing alone in the kitchen with the handpiece rested on the top of her shoulder and her stomach feeling like it is full of coals.
It is no big thing, Raymond’s mother assures herself, putting the phone back on the receiver at her end. Raymond only left twenty-five minutes ago. Twenty-five minutes ago Raymond was standing right here in this very kitchen and surely that counts for something. Harold has it: he has wandered down through the creek again. You remember the last time he wandered down through the creek and came upon the carcass of that dead Rottweiler and it was more than an hour and a half before anyone found him. That has to count for something. Remember how you worried that day? And for what? Boys and their curiosities. That has to count for something and that makes two things that count for something.
Raymond’s mother decides that she will wait before calling the school. She tells herself that if she calls in a fluster she will only increase her chances of hearing bad news. She sits at the kitchen table instead and puts her fingernail in one of the chip marks Raymond made with a hammer and nail when he was three years old and the table was brand new. Raymond is seven years old now and she is sure that must count for something also. Three is enough to stop counting, she tells herself. Sitting at the table, she picks at the chip mark until a little piece of grey laminex breaks away and cuts open the skin beneath her fingernail. The piece stays embedded beneath her fingernail and the blood drips out through the tiny gap and down the print-side of her finger and she blots it on the table like a child making finger drawings. She decides then that she will call the school. The blood is a good distraction for her to call the school and not bring bad luck upon the situation and she recognises this much.
Raymond’s mother has the school’s phone number stored in the phone’s speed dial. It is stored under Ray’s School. It is such a little piece of paper to have to write on, she thinks. She thinks like this because neither her nor Raymond’s father ever call Raymond Ray. Their neighbour Mr Langford calls Raymond Ray and the policeman who found him playing with that dead Rottweiler that other time called him Ray but they are the only two people Raymond’s mother has ever heard calling him Ray. She feels angry at herself for writing it Ray when she would not have said it Ray. In future you should write it like you would say it, she scolds herself. Ray-mond. The fingerprints on the table look to her like paw prints, as if a cat has come in through the window and shot across its surface. She remembers a story about birds coming in through a window once and it frightens her.
When the phone picks up at the school it is not the regular secretary but a woman calling herself Mrs Stokes. Raymond’s mother knows the regular secretary quite well and always calls her Mrs Lamb. Raymond’s mother calls all of her seniors by their polite titles. She cannot help it. Mr Langford is only seven years her senior and she calls him by his polite title, while Raymond’s father calls him Teddy. Raymond’s mother has never heard of this Mrs Stokes before.
‘May I speak with Mrs Lamb please?’ she asks.
‘I’m sorry,’ Mrs Stokes says, ‘Margaret no longer works Mondays. I’m her replacement for Mondays and Thursdays. I’m sure I can help you all the same. Is it to do with the new canteen roster?’
‘I am Raymond’s mother,’ Raymond’s mother says. She feels herself starting to cry then and she quickly hangs up the phone and puts her finger in her mouth and bites down hard until she can taste the blood coming out through the tiny cut beneath her fingernail. The piece of laminex stays lodged in there and when she pushes her tongue against the area to taste the blood more strongly, she feels the sharp edge of the laminex and makes the tip of her tongue stiff and pushes against it thinking that it will either pierce through the tip of her tongue or be pushed far enough down into her finger that nothing will be able to touch it anymore anyway. Neither happens and finally she takes her finger out of her mouth and is surprised to see that there is not any blood on it. The piece of laminex looks clean, like a shard of fibreglass, and she easily picks it away by pinching it between the thumbnail and index fingernail on her opposite hand. When she has pulled it away the finger starts to bleed again. The blood is thin and bright.
She calls Raymond’s father back at work then. She knows it is not good luck to be calling around like this and in this state with her finger bleeding like this. She thinks that any hope of putting herself out of this state seems distant and calls him anyway. She thinks if she squats herself down on the ground the balance will make up for something lost. ‘What is lost?’ she asks herself aloud. She is trying pragmatism. ‘What is lost, Gloria?’ She asks with her name and everything. Waiting for Raymond’s father to pick up she wonders why she let him convince her that it was okay for Raymond to walk by himself to school when he is only seven years old—even if there is only one road to cross. She wonders why she let herself get convinced so easily over such an important matter and why she always calls Mr Langford Mr Langford except for when Raymond’s father is around calling him Teddy and then she starts calling him Teddy too and she wonders why she lets herself get convinced like that. She thinks of a crow unbuttoning a school shirt with its black and lacquered beak. She puts her other hand on the top of her head and thinks murder is a horrible collective noun.
After nine rings Raymond’s father answers the phone at work and Raymond’s mother tells him what has just happened. She tells him about this Mrs Stokes woman whom she has never even met and she tells him about the way she started to cry and the cut on her finger and she can hear her own voice and knows the way it must sound and she says, ‘Why did I let you convince me that it would be alright for him to walk by himself when he is only seven, for God’s sake, Harold?’
Raymond’s father listens to her and assures her that it is probably not at all like she is making out and that it is probably all quite okay. He tells her that she should call the school again and speak to this Mrs Stokes properly this time. He says ‘damn carburettor’ right in the middle of explaining all of this to her and when she asks him what damn carburettor is supposed to mean for God’s sake, he says, ‘Hang on a minute, Gloria. I need somebody to get this damn carburettor over to Clarke’s in the next twenty minutes.’ She asks him if he is talking to her and he says, ‘Listen, it’s hell, Gloria.’ He says, ‘I’m sure this Mrs Stokes is a shipshape woman. You should give her a call and then give me a call back when you know something for certain. Alright?’ Shipshape is the expression Raymond’s father used the time Raymond was lost in the creek for an hour and half playing with that dead Rottweiler. Shipshape police constable: find him in no time, Gloria, you’ll see. Everything will be shipshape. Slap.
After speaking to Raymond’s father this second time Raymond’s mother puts on her cardigan and shoes and goes out of the house. She does not put socks on her feet and her shoes are the kind a person pulls on and off without bothering to untie the laces. As she walks along the footpath toward the school she keeps the cardigan pulled closed across her front with one hand, so as to hide her nightshirt. She starts to cry again and walks faster and there are lots of cars driving along the road.
At the vacant block Raymond’s mother stops. She looks to the back of the block where the corrugated iron fence has been kicked in and one of the panels is missing altogether. It is the entranceway to the creek. The vacant block is full of rubbish. Most of it has been set fire to. There was a house on the block once and it was set fire to by a lightning strike. Midway between Raymond’s mother and the entranceway to the creek is the skeleton of a burnt mattress. The black springs make it look like something used for trapping animals. Staring past the mattress Raymond’s mother can only picture that dead Rottweiler now, dumped with its insides coming through the side of its belly, dumped in the creek because dumping fees at the local tip were too high, or because the person who was driving the car felt too guilty to try and find the owner so it might be put to rest beneath a favourite tree or ruined flowerbed. It was Raymond who found the Rottweiler and then the police constable who found Raymond.
The day Raymond found the Rottweiler was the same day Raymond’s father hit Raymond’s mother with his closed hand. He hit her when she would not stop crying and then everything was fine and the shipshape police constable found Raymond just like Raymond’s father said he would and everything was fine. Raymond’s mother smiled and the constable smiled too standing at the door and Raymond still had the dog’s blood on his hands and on the knees of his trousers and everything was fine that day. Even the bruise that joined the corner of her mouth to her ear was fine once Raymond had been found and returned home by the shipshape police constable who said nothing just smiled.
Raymond’s mother puts her right leg through the gap in the fence first and then steps through with the rest of her body. She keeps the cardigan pulled closed in front even as she is stepping through and the wind makes the bent piece of iron move up and down along the remaining section of fence. It is loud and grating and Raymond’s mother brings her head through last and thinks of a dog waiting on the other side, ready to latch onto the side of her face like a scrap-metal guard dog.
From the entranceway Raymond’s mother can see along the creek all the way to the school now. There is no dog. The oval at the bottom end of the school backs directly onto the creek and Raymond’s mother can see all the way to the oval and the oval is empty. At first she does not see Mr Langford, since he is hidden behind the rise in the creek bank. And when he comes out from behind the rise he is no more than thirty metres away from her and he sees her standing abreast of the slope and he waves to her. She does not wave and she watches him until he is standing right in front of her.
‘Hello, Gloria,’ he says.
She does not say anything to him. Her eyes are red still and her cheeks are tight where the wind dried her tears before they could reach halfway to her lips even. She looks at Mr Langford and at his hands and she keeps her cardigan pulled modestly across her front.
‘Another dead dog,’ Mr Langford says to her, shaking his head. Mr Langford is seven years older than her and he has very white hair and a small round head. His hair is very white and his cheeks are red and his mouth is small even for his head. He bends down and wipes his hands on the grass and when he bends he keeps his back straight and his hands only just reach the ground either side of his feet. ‘Do you remember the day Ray found the Wainwrights’?’ he says, motioning to his own hands. ‘Bad street for dogs. Busy. Always busy,’ he says, shaking his head side to side. His knees are bent.
‘The policeman,’ Raymond’s mother says back to him.
Mr Langford looks up at her and she starts to cry again and when she tries to step backwards through the hole in the fence he takes hold of her wrist and her cardigan falls open and she begins to cry really.
‘Gloria,’ he says. ‘We’re only talking now.’
In the distance a group of children come running onto the bottom oval like creatures coming in through an open window. One of them kicks a football and it sails over the fence and into the creek. Mr Langford let’s go of Raymond’s mother’s wrist and disappears through the hole in the fence himself. Raymond’s mother sits down very low to the ground and wishes Raymond’s father were there to hit some sense into her with his shipshape hand.
The Jazz Band by Daniel Young
Daniel Young is a Sydney-based software developer, reader, writer and editor who was born and raised in Brisbane. He has had short fiction published in Issue Two of Hello Mr. Magazine and flash fiction in Seizure and Cuttings Journal. He is struggling to write a novel while remotely studying an MA (Writing) through Swinburne University. He is the founder and editor of Tincture Journal.
The Jazz Band
The jazz band walked onto the stage, quiet and unassuming, dressed in jeans and plain black t-shirts, and began to shift things around without looking at the audience. The shuffling and scraping of their chairs, the tuning of their instruments, the precise placement of their glasses of water and bottles of beer; it may have been part of the performance—they were known for including such things at the beginning of their albums—so the crowd began to hush, their conversations dispersing into the auditorium, hanging wastefully in the air before being forgotten, lost for all time.
When Billy suggested the jazz band, Alex baulked at the idea but went along with it just the same. After exchanging messages and flirting online for what seemed like an eternity, they finally decided it was time to meet. Billy was attractive: a cute Aussie guy in his mid-twenties with a stable job. He didn’t have a gym-built body, but Alex didn’t care about that and he tried more than once to arrange a date. He’d been nearly ready to give up, coming to the conclusion that Billy was either intractable, disinterested or already taken. A few times he’d met guys online only to later find out they already had a boyfriend; it seemed to come with the territory, although Billy didn’t seem the type to play around. He had a quiet understated sincerity that Alex liked. When Billy suggested an improvised jazz concert, Alex wasn’t going to say no, although he did wonder exactly what he’d agreed to.
For what felt like a few minutes already, the drummer had been scraping something metallic across the top of one of his drums. Alex had never been to anything like this back in Singapore. He closed his eyes and ignored the percussionist’s noises, wishing they’d just gone for a drink instead.
Alex’s mother had phoned last night, berating him for not buying a new phone card, for not calling home more often. She wanted to know everything, and each tidbit of news was relayed in a shouting voice to his dad before the conversation could continue. They both wanted to visit him in spring, but he told her that Australia was too boring, especially Brisbane; he would go home instead. Somehow he didn’t seem ready to share his Aussie life with them. He’d begun to make this town his own, although he did miss home sometimes. He thought about the hawker food stalls back home and started dreaming of claypot chicken rice with delicious lap cheong sausage; a hardened rice crust formed on the base of the claypot, and he savoured the change in texture as he reached the end of the dish. The thick wet humidity of the Singaporean air embraced him tightly as his head tilted forwards, waking him up. He glanced at Billy, hoping his daydream had gone unnoticed. Imperceptibly, the percussionist’s scrapings had been joined by the pianist’s hypnotic light touch; his fingers danced across a wide range of keys and the gentle tapping somehow resulted in a deep and complex reverberation that gradually magnified as it spread throughout the performance space.
The double bass joined in, striking just three notes slowly in a short melody, repeating it again and again. Alex began to dream about his mother’s famous Nonya Laksa.
Billy drew his attention from the stage and looked at Alex, sitting there, eyes closed. Absorbing the music to its full effect, or falling asleep? It didn’t matter. He’d agreed on the date because he hated coming to these things alone, but he had no expectation that Alex would enjoy it. The double bass player was plucking at the thick strings more fiercely now; each bass-laden thwap was a punch in Billy’s side. One of them fractured his rib, recalling that day, three years ago now. The others landed in a dull thud that he knew would emerge in the morning as a beautiful deep-purple bruise. He somehow enjoyed reliving the past, letting the music beat him senseless. It replaced all traces of the present.
The drummer was still scraping something across the top of his drums, tracing it in a slow circular motion. A set of house keys? Billy realised with a start that Qiang still had a spare key to his apartment. He hadn’t bothered to change the locks after Qiang left Australia. The scraping continued, now joined by the occasional sharp tapping of hi-hat cymbals. Tap-tap-tap, an insistent woodpecker keen to crack open his skull and burrow into his brain. He tried to keep each of the band’s instruments distinct in his head, tracking the almost imperceptible ways they were changing over time, wondering how the music had somehow made its way from Point A to Point B. The initially disparate parts had merged to become a single swirling mess.
The doctor had been friendly today. A GP in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley, just across the road from where he was sitting now. The clinic, being in a so-called “gay area”, administered lots of sexual health check-ups, and the staff were good at asking the necessary questions without getting too nosy or raising an eyebrow.
“I see it’s your first time here. Is there anything else I can help you with today?” The doctor was tall and handsome, but not Billy’s type.
“Oh, no thanks. My normal GP is close to home but I came here because it’s close to work. Just the tests today.”
The doctor smiled, not skipping a beat. “No worries, just a few questions first. When were you last tested?”
Billy answered. Yes, it had been a while. And yes, he was sexually active. Though not so much lately. No, he had no real reason to be worried, but… you know how it is. He didn’t add that he rarely met new people these days because he couldn’t trust anybody and preferred to stay home alone and drink. Last night he’d received a message online from an anonymous person, advising him to get tested. It could be a prank—the person’s dating profile didn’t even have a photo—but it was scary stuff nonetheless. Enough to convince Billy that it was time to be tested again. No need to tell all that to the doctor.
As the blood left his veins and filled the nurse’s syringe, he sat there and blinked, wondering what his future might hold and whether or not he even cared. The nurse taped a cotton bud gently over his arm and he left the clinic. The results would come and could not be changed. His boss was out of town so he extended his lunch break and walked along Brisbane’s murky brown riverfront, trying to get as far from the office as possible. The sun beat down, even on this winter day, and people jogged past with confident strides. He thought of his small high-rise apartment in the leafy green inner west, clinging as it was to its own bend in the river, looking across to the towering heights of Highgate Hill. He could go home—nobody at work would care—and he could spend the afternoon with a bottle of Shiraz, some music and maybe a warm bath. But he was meeting Alex tonight for the jazz concert and the theatre was close to his office; if he went home, he’d never find the motivation to go out again. He thought about cancelling as he walked back to the office. It wouldn’t be hard to find some excuse.
“A Scotch and dry and a Corona with lime thanks,” said Alex, smiling at the bartender and admiring his rounded butt as he turned to fetch a clean glass. Alex didn’t drink often, but Billy wanted one and it might help the rest of the concert pass by more quickly. The first half had been interesting in a way and it surprised him that traditional instruments could be used to create such sounds, but it had felt like it might never end. When he wasn’t nodding off, Alex tried to make a connection between the musicians’ actions and what he was hearing, but the link seemed so tenuous that he wondered if the whole thing was just a pre-recorded charade. No, it couldn’t be that—he just didn’t understand this stuff. At least Billy was something different; something he hadn’t yet experienced since coming to Brisbane to study business and hospitality management. He represented something other than the usual late nights out in tiny gay bars, with the same people every week dancing the night away. Nights that would often end with him waking up next a stranger in a cloud of awkwardness and sour morning breath. It never felt good afterwards, but it was a change from life back home.
The bartender returned with the drinks and Alex paid, resolving to just try and enjoy the second half of the show. Maybe they could grab a quick bite to eat later on.
“Thanks,” said Billy as Alex passed him the Scotch. “What did you think so far?”
“It was… interesting. Different,” replied Alex.
Billy rolled his eyes but still smiled that cheeky little boy smile that had attracted Alex so much in the first place.
“What music do you like? Kylie? Gaga? The usual shit?” he asked.
“That stuff’s all OK, but I prefer Chinese pop stars. Do you know Faye Wong?”
“Hah! I’m not a huge fan, but I saw her in Chungking Express. She’s kind of old now, right? It’s all about K-Pop these days. But I loved that movie. You know, I randomly saw it on the world movie channel about five years ago and I think I’ve been a rice queen ever since…”
“So you only like Asian guys? Here in Brisbane it’s mostly just the really old white guys chasing me. Lots of young people put ‘no Asians’ in their dating profile.”
Billy shrugged and said nothing.
“Don’t be shy, it’s fine. You’ll like me then, since I’m a potato queen,” grinned Alex, poking him in the belly in a teasing way. His belly was soft. “I love Wong Kar-Wai’s films too. To be honest, I’m more interested in film than music. I’d study that if my parents would let me…”
“The film festival starts soon, maybe we can check some stuff out? I love Korean films, and they also have a British and Irish showcase that looks interesting. And lots more.”
Alex watched as Billy drank his Scotch, finishing it with one last gulp. He seemed excited now. When they’d met before the concert he’d been shy, maybe even aloof. On the internet Billy was a tough nut to crack, but Alex was now thinking that his persistence might have been worthwhile.
A buzzer rang and Alex placed his arm in the small of Billy’s back, guiding him from the foyer back into the theatre space. The room was cool and the warmth emanating from Billy’s body seemed like a generous offering. They took their seats.
Billy didn’t know why he preferred Asian guys and the inevitable question always embarrassed him. It felt wrong to choose partners based on their race, and he wasn’t proud of it, but he also couldn’t deny his preference. It was best not to think about it too deeply. His friends had suggested he dated international students because he was afraid of commitment. They all leave Brisbane after a few years, maybe that suits you? There could be some truth in that. He was lucky that Qiang had left when he did, before the situation escalated further. He should have called the police, but had been unable to. On a logical level, Qiang’s departure was a blessing, and yet it was still in the forefront of Billy’s mind every day, both the good and the bad.
The band didn’t mess around this time. They came onto the stage and the pianist placed a metronome on the piano’s glossy black frame. It seemed to be hooked up to an amp. An electric metronome? He set it ticking and the sound filled the theatre, setting a fairly rapid pace for the music to come. And then he began, playing not music exactly, or at least not melody. No, he tapped at just one or two keys, repetitively, in time with the constant ticking, creating a fluid wall of sound. Billy relaxed, closing his eyes for a moment to savour the effect, listening carefully for the slightest change.
The metronome’s amplified ticking drew Billy’s attention to the inexorable onward march of time. It counted down the number of seconds since he had laid peacefully in Qiang’s arms; the number of days since Qiang had been inside him; the number of months since their brutal last few weeks together. The tapping of individual piano keys created a single reverberating mass and still the metronome ticked on, oblivious. Every tick brought each audience member one moment closer to their own end.
But the drummer had other ideas. He was using the full kit now and refused to keep the same beat as the metronome. The tangential rhythms became disorienting and Billy felt a rush in his arteries as his pulse quickened. The bass player began thwapping away at his strings again, but it was hard to discern the effect of his efforts on top of the now screeching cacophony of manic piano. It was the drummer who was really shaking things up, hitting his kit hard, completely freed from the restrictive bounds of the metronome’s tick. Goosebumps formed on Billy’s arms and the fine blonde hairs stood to attention like enchanted snakes. He felt tears in his eyes and, thankful for the dark theatre, let them flow without wiping them away. A crash of cymbals took over and it was no longer a beat but a wall of sound, joining the piano and bass with destructive force. Billy looked sideways and was surprised to find Alex leaning forward in his seat, simultaneously riveted and shocked by the jazz band’s climax.
The drummer broke away, regaining his individuality as a discernible beat returned, and Billy tried his best to follow it. The pace kept shifting, battling against the metronome. Occasionally the two beats would coincide and they’d seem to be keeping the same rhythm, but they would always fall out of step again. At other moments, the drummer went manic again and lost himself among the roar of the piano and bass. The incessant ticking became redundant, reminding Billy that boundaries were meaningless.
Yet as he smiled at Alex and looked back towards the stage, despite the cacophonous roar, all he could see was the thin pendulum, still swinging joyfully from side-to-side. Silenced, perhaps, but not stopped. And gradually, as each musician slowed and their sounds danced over the top of each other, Billy finally heard them again as three distinct elements. The metronome continued to tick, even after the musicians stopped, out of place and obnoxious. Finally, the pianist raised his hand and stopped the pendulum’s movement. The audience broke out in stunned applause.
They sat on the ferry, navigating their way home on the river’s lazy bends as they cut through the city and into the inner west. Alex, being slightly taller, allowed Billy’s head to rest on his shoulder. The ferry master looked at them a few times but Alex returned his gaze, feeling boldly protective of this strange Brisbane boy. The ferry master shrugged and gave up, walking outside into the bracing wind as the vessel skimmed over the black water. The window was dirty, a water-saving measure of the city council, who had decided to stop washing the ferries. Alex looked outside but saw only a scratchy dark mess, overlaid with the bright reflected interior of the ferry’s cabin.
Billy was sleeping by the time they reached their stop and a small wet patch of drool had soaked into the shoulder of Alex’s jumper. Alex smiled and tapped him gently on the head to wake him up, which he did with a confused, almost frightened look.
“We’re here. Let’s go.”
On a quiet dark street in a quiet dark suburb, watched only by the possums as they scurried over the power lines above, they kissed goodnight. In another time, they each would have asked the other to stay the night, but tonight it seemed that only silence and solitude could follow what they’d experienced.
“Thanks for taking me. It wasn’t my kind of thing, but I’m glad we met. Let’s have dinner soon.”
“OK. Goodnight Alex. See you soon.” Alex watched as Billy turned and walked away, trekking uphill to where his apartment building waited. He stood for a moment and thought about giving up his business degree to study film. Finally, hands in his pockets to ward off the cold night air, he walked in the other direction towards his own place.
In bed, happy to be alone, Billy didn’t think about Alex. He didn’t think about Qiang, or the dent in his bedroom wall where Qiang had thrown his phone that time. He didn’t think about the doctor or the blood tests. The sheets were smooth and soft against his tender, naked skin. He felt like he’d gone a few rounds in a boxing ring and shook his head to clear the fuzz, wondering if any of it was real. His ears were ringing with the silence, so he plugged his mp3 player into the speakers beside his bed and chose the “repeat album” option. The music started with the sound of chairs and equipment being arranged on-stage. This time the bass player began, striking a short wistful melody and repeating it again and again. The still and empty night, unlike so many before and after, passed by quickly, so that it wasn’t long before he awoke. The sun had risen, shimmering golden foil on the river’s surface, concealing the muddy brown reality beneath.
Cameron Lowe
Cameron Lowe lives in Geelong, Victoria. His two book-length poetry collections are Porch Music (Whitmore Press, 2010) and Circle Work (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013).
Mary Louise Nicholas
Louise Nicholas is a South Australian teacher and poet. WomanSpeak, co-written with Jude Aquilina, was published by Wakefield Press in 2009, and a chapbook, Large, in 2013. Her collection, The List of Last Remaining, was short-listed for the Adelaide Festival Unpublished Manuscript award.
S. J. J. F Rutherford
S. J. J. F. Rutherford is a pen name of Simon Patton’s. He lives with his partner, two cats and Sealyham the Terrier near Chinaman Creek in Central Victoria, and translates Chinese poetry. He spent five months working in Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong last year, and lived near the Tai Hang Tung and Nam Shan Housing Estates.
Cafe (Tai Hang Tung Estate大坑東邨)
Ice in the tall glass cloaked with cola jostles bubbles of fizz, and
I feel this heat tell only the hard wood under my tail-bone. The
TV is mute: it addresses the room graphically, in fluent Chinese
characters, beneath perfectly made-up faces lip-reading “news”.
The kitchen, for its few orders, roars industrially out of the
wok, while — in the centre of his Imaginary Loungeroom — a
man chats through a smart hair-cut deeper into his mirror.
Jonathan Hadwen
Jonathan Hadwen is a Brisbane writer whose poetry has been published in Westerly, fourW, and Stand Magazine, as well as other publications in Australia and overseas. In 2013 he was named runner-up in the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for an unpublished manuscript. He recently had a prose poem sequence published in Writing to the Edge, published by Spineless Wonders.
In the neighbourhood
I drive out to see a friend. He lives out west in a suburb that was brand-new about thirty years ago, but is now a bit run-down. I drive through 60 zones, and 80 zones, a school zone, intersections, and roundabouts in the more modern areas. On every side I pass streets lined with houses. I have lived in this city my whole life. There are so many streets I will never drive down.
*
A plane sinks into the suburbs. A cloud reaches out like a great claw.
*
There are more birds around than I ever knew, and they fight all the time, and some of them even sing. Some of the birds are regulars – a pack of noisy miners, a couple of crows – but occasionally there are lorikeets, or rosellas, and even more rarely, a song-bird. I can never see him, only hear him, there in the trees, no matter how long I stare and study each bough and branch. He never sings the same song twice – he is like a composer trying out melodies, a perfectionist, who is never truly satisfied with the tune.
*
I never see the old couple downstairs, except on bin night. They keep their place locked-up tight, and the air-conditioner is always running whether it is hot or otherwise. It is the man who takes the rubbish out. He totters down the few steps from their first floor apartment with his walking stick, and one small bag of trash.
*
The old man is coughing again. It is bad today. My throat catches just listening to it. The sun is out, in its merciless way. The birds are happy – it is early summer – there is always enough to eat.
Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture by Gaiutra Bahadur reviewed by Nicole Thomas
Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture
by Gaiutra Bahadur
ISBN 9781849042772
Reviewed by NICOLE THOMAS
At the heart of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, is Gaiutra Bahadur’s personal quest to discover one woman’s identity amongst the mass of people relocated during the period of indenture. Born in Guyana and immigrating to the United States at the age of six with her family, Bahadur, a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 2007-2008, is an American correspondent and book critic. With journalistic scrutiny, Bahadur embarks on a journey in search of her great-grandmother, Sujaria’s story; one of many women buried deep in the history of colonial discourse. Curious about her Indian origins, with desire to understand how her great-grandmother’s decision to cross the Indian Ocean in 1903 helped shape her destiny, she returns to India to engage with a past that has impacted on present perceptions of identity. Her exploration of the past excavates the injustices and degradation suffered by immigrants under the power of colonial authority.
Following the Abolition Act of 1833 that ended slavery in the British Empire in 1834, the system of indenture was introduced and thereafter became a second form of servitude. Over a million Indians were deployed and spread across the globe to work on sugar plantations, half of them transported to the Caribbean. Surviving the horrific journey was just the beginning of a life of inequality, mistreatment, and dislocation. Emigrants were stripped of caste and kin and turned into an indistinguishable mass of plantation labourers, forced into sub-standard social and contractual arrangements. Unruly recruiters misled and schemed in order to induce labourers and preyed on the vulnerabilities of desperate women to serve the over-population of men. A gender imbalance among the indentured contributed to the breakdown of families, igniting jealousy, which often lead to violence and the deaths of many coolie women.
The term “coolie” derived from the Tamil word kuli, meaning wages or hire. Over the eight decades that “coolies” were ferried across the globe the word evolved into an ethnic slur, and spilled fluidly from tongues of plantation managers and overseers as a reminder to indentured labourers of their menial origins and lowliness in the race hierarchy. It was “A subtle challenge to their claim to belong”, Bahadur states in the preface. The author re-inscribes the c-word, explaining that while it may be offensive and painful for some, it is true to her subject. “My great-grandmother was a high-caste Hindu. That is a fact. But she left India as a “coolie”. That is also a fact. She was one individual swept up in a particular mass movement of people, and the perceptions of those who controlled that process determined her identity at least as much as she did. To them, she was a coolie woman, a stock character possessing stereotyped qualities, which shaped who she was by limiting who she could ever be.” (p.xxi)
The struggle with identity emerges on the first page, when Bahadur takes a retrospective look at her point of departure, from her home in Guyana to a new life in America. At the impressionable age of six, still connected to the memories of home in Guyana but disconnected by the act of leaving, Bahadur describes her sense of displacement as being severed in two. This severing of self relates to the nature of diaspora, and a motif of connection and disconnection weaves throughout the narrative, drawing parallels to the experiences of indentured labourers severed from imaginary homelands, religion and culture. Bahadur’s personal severance reflects on the lives of the women who were physically dismembered by acts of violence from their men. Juxtaposition of the outside and inside spaces she inhabits expresses the diasporic struggle of trying to locate the self in the interior and exterior of new world culture. The memory of a distant home is the vein that draws her back to the Caribbean as a young woman where she describes her arrival as “a tingling fusion of inside and out, an electric union of outside and in, a sparks-flying soldering together of the soul” (9). The sensation describes a physical memory, expressing a psychological essence of belonging, whereby a return brings forth an imagined wholeness. As a whole, the narrative is a process of identification that oscillates between boundaries of culture and place, exploring the uncertainty of self and belonging.
From Guyana’s national archives, Bahadur exhumes an artefact that catalogues only a few details of her great-grandmother’s indentured life. In 1903, Sujaria, four-months pregnant and travelling alone, sailed with 560 adults on The Clyde, from Calcutta to the Caribbean. Bahadur’s exploration shifts from the potholed roads of Bihar to archives in England, where she locates a documented plethora of coolie sufferings from the shadowy repository of history. While the narrative exposes the power struggles that existed between indentured men and the repressive legal system that convicted and imprisoned them for minor labour violations, it engages a wider focus on the more nuanced stories of women; those who escaped the oppressions of their country and their men, for the social leverages that immigrating offered, only to meet with adversity. Through invoking place and reconstructing the trauma of indenture, the voices of coolie women speak against the colonial context and act as a collective narrative for subalterns who have been written out of history. We hear of Maharani, who at the age of five married a much older man, and was widowed at the age of twelve. Forced to cook and clean for her in-laws, she endured eight-years of beatings before escaping and crossing oceans to flee India: And later, from Doolarie, a remarried widower whose new partner beat her with a hoe for talking to another man, scarring her for life. Sujaria, however, remains silent, but her absence is a defining presence in the narrative. She appears fleetingly as an apparition. Bahadur attempts to locate her with the summoning of rhetoric questioning, “Did she look back over her shoulder as she boarded the ship? Was there regret in her glance?” (47). Through Bahadur’s speculations and conjectures the reader is able to imagine Sujaria, shifting between the alternate scenarios, inhabiting the shared spaces and experiencing similar injustices of indentured life, though this is only speculation on the moments that make up Sujaria’s life. While her exploration fails to excavate her great-grandmother’s story, her journey and research finds the suspended voices of other coolie women, who like Sujuaria, left their villages and travelled the middle passage, to reinvention in a new world. This new narrative gleaned from research and the stories of other coolie women is restorative literary practise, re-addressing the histories of coolie women suspended and forgotten. The writing functions as a restorative and reformative agent for memory, preventing the history of coolies from vanishing with the past.
The book shifts the balance of power from official colonial archives, to the unauthorised versions of indenture told by the memory keepers whose stories descended generations. Bahadur articulates the relationship between stories and the unreliable nature of memory. “The will to remember the past is undermined by an equally formidable will to forget” (18), and the stories that did descend often reveal as much about how families choose to see their histories as they do about the actual histories” (48). What emerges from the narrative is an exploration of story and its power to shape identity. “Unravelled, they began, ever so slowly, to spin the threads of a novel identity” (62). The style of the narrative relies on metaphor and figurative elements of language to weave what rests on the bare skeleton of story. The Ramayan, an ancient Hindu epic with religious and allegorical meaning, coursed through the veins of displaced Hindus’ and was their “lifeblood”, says Bahadur. “The epic, like the diaspora that identifies with it, is preoccupied with women who break the codes of accepted sexual behaviour” (108). While the adoption and telling of The Ramayan forged a sense of belonging and provided a social life for the indentured, it may have influenced men in their actions of violence against Indian women, serving as a powerful reminder to women of consequent punishment for uncontrolled sexuality. The stories that Bahadur weaves into her narrative show the power of story and language to generate meaning and provide a sense of reality.
Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture traces the history of Indian migration, down the Hooghly river, around the Cape, and across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, trawling through the complex lives of a generation of Indian women who sought exile from their country and their men, and delving into the depths of Indian diaspora and the struggle for identity. Gaiutra Bahadur does not return with the story that belonged to her great-grandmother but she brings home the acknowledgement that identity is as much about lived experience as it is about self-creation and what one believes to be true. The narrative proffers that the self is forever adapting, that identity is not anchored to the past but is perpetually shifting in order to belong.
NICOLE THOMAS lives on the South Coast of NSW and holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts with Distinction from the University of Wollongong. She was awarded The UoW Centre for Canadian Australian Studies (CCAS) Award.
Cyril Wong reviews White Coins by James Byrne
White Coins
by James Byrne
Arc Publications
ISBN 978 1908376 47 3
Reviewed by CYRIL WONG
White Coins by UK poet, James Byrne, is a collection that operates zealously across the rich surfaces of semantic interconnectedness and imagistic playfulness. Not unlike more conventional lyric and confessional voices, perhaps, the poet here begins at “a ransacked house” or a home from the past, serving as a familiar starting point for segues across time and dimensions of meaning. The first poem, “Historia,” as the etymology of the title also suggests, is a concerted attempt to gain new knowledge or renewed insight through poetic investigation. There is a vulnerable acknowledgement of once being “six and made of violins” or having experienced how “love blunts.” But there is also a rejuvenation of perspective, such as when a singular leaf becomes a “scapel-like finger”, simultaneously revealing the speaker’s humility at not taking credit for a space of lofty detachment (the leaf “not pointing towards a balance-act”) but yet achieving (“balancing”) that serendipitous equipoise, nonetheless, between an intense emotionality the past evokes and a present opportunity for imaginative reinvention.
The following poem, “Economies of the Living,” a series of dictionary-like entries of aspects of our world refracted through a surrealist lens, furthers the strategy of sustaining a balance between startling description and emotional expressionism. From lyrically sweeping comments on violent mothers, word-portraits of animals to imperative statements about eternity, Byrnes reveals himself to be aligned with the Romantics in their connection to nature and in that yearning to rejoin the spiritual sublime. In the section addressed to “Immortality,” for example, the speaker promises: “I will watch the raked light of sunset over Shardeloes and find you via memory.”
But first and foremost is the poet’s faithfulness to an unceasing concatenation of expansive associations and symbolisms. Take these lines from “River Nocturnes,” for instance:
labyrinth trails in a sonical stormlash
pronged overexposure of lightning
a skybull stamping out spherical thunder
Byrnes’ priority or clear sense of artistic glee is clearly in the description of the thing. Personae introduced through the poems are more ideas than characters, even if they include family members, as the sustained strategy across the poems is to paint an enriching textual layer that generates ever-revealing semantic outcomes. A deliberate emphasis on descriptive playfulness does not, of course, mean that deeper and ethical urgencies are absent. As the poems progress, the experience of which is analogous to moving through a museum of surrealist art, laser-like criticisms regarding political and social ills can unexpectedly arise. In this section (“To Measure Another’s Foot By Your Own Last”) from the long poem, “Phrase and Fable,” the writing becomes denser with meaning or more compact with moral urgency, without at the same time losing the rhythm of the poet’s imaginative segues already generated elsewhere:
Like politicians first-footing on humanitarian issues,
foreign policy is a butcher, reflective as its blade.
Hide history’s measuring tape, the battlefield chemists
and dioxin hotspots, the attics of clumsy gas masks…
Foreign policy dictates to always find one’s own feet
before putting the boot down upon the neck…
Later in “Soapbox” during the part of the book now marching towards including more implicit to explicit social commentary, Byrne breezily sums up, mockingly decries or satirically categorises metonymic objects or ideas that point to fundamental human fallacies, pairing each object or idea to a specific country in both provocative and evocative ways. This is executed with verve and vim bordering on delirium and the comic. But the poet still manages to seduce the reader into pondering meaningfully over every liberating rapid-fire connection:
Egyptian chevrons / Saudi princeships / Kazakh autocracies /
Greek dawns / Russian hooliganism / Burmese chalkboard /
Singaporean spyglass / American liberties / Israeli intifadas /
Nigerian Shellsuits / Japanese waterworks / Chinese whispers
Imagist, social commentator or symbolist, the poet acknowledges and pays stylistic tribute to literary influences from symbolist poets, Verlaine and Rimbaud, to Ashbery in the poem, “Rimbaud Villanelles,” by revealing next-to-nothing about his literary heroes (only that Rimbaud “popeyed on absinthe” or that Ashbery’s Illuminations go delicately on Scarborough”) and focusing instead on banalities, sense-impressions, the passing gossip and white noise of urbanity these poets must have confronted to fuel their work, etc. Surrealist painters and symbolist poets repeatedly subvert expectations to demonstrate that truth-making is never certain (thus permitting endless possibilities for meaning across the canvas or page) or that there is always room for an unusual interpretation. But one must be reminded that play, in such artistic contexts, is never just play. Byrne demonstrates, for instance, that the grumblings of one’s political conscience can–or should–be woven (consciously or otherwise) into any bewildering tapestry of symbolist presentations challenging the knowable through aesthetic subversion and reinvention.
Quoting ironically from Jeremy Paxman at the start of “On the Ordinary” about how poetry has “connived at its own irrelevance,” Byrne proceeds to show how his own brand of poetry, even in its seeming “irrelevance”–interpreted here as literary jouissance at the level of aesthetic effects and imaginative flourishes–can quickly turn “serious” or “relevant” when hard-hitting questions float to the surface of the poetically meandering mind: “How do an entire people lose themselves?” A more implicit answer might be (in my own mind): “By allowing oneself to be easily categorised.” And as Byrne writes in his poem, half-quoting, half-asserting: “Art is not the ‘fixed or regulated sequence…customary; usual’. We are mysterious to ourselves.” It becomes a matter of conforming to social class and elitism, from which poetry should break away in order to wrap itself authentically around our deepest mysteries, the unknowability at the core of existence. The poem ends with this: “All people are either ordinary or extraordinary maniacs.” It is clear which the poet prefers to be. To be a “maniac” in this case is to forge one’s original poetic voice while still remaining reflective (even as the primary stylistic urge is to deflect, subtly destruct, delight in disorder) of humdrum to harsher realities.
At the same time, however, I keep returning to an earlier sense that after the enjoyment (for both writer and reader, I’m sure) of unpacking or merely delighting in startling word-play and the sometimes mysterious connections between ideas, I am still moved centrally by that Romantic imagination operating (I’m convinced) behind this scintillating surface of ever-shifting language. That quiet acknowledgement of the Romantic sublime as presented through nature is evident throughout the book, waiting just beyond the unceasing layers-upon-layers of meaning; as if given a chance, nature provides not just a boundless source of metaphors, but also respite and a curiously embracive calm beyond human-made uncertainties or semantic fragmentation; as when the book closes with a line like this to remind the reader of that which is all-encompassing already abiding in us all:
all these lives of sea
filling out in our ears
CYRIL WONG is the Singapore Literature Prize-winning author of poetry collections such as Unmarked Treasure, Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light, The Dictator’s Eyebrow and After You. He has also published Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me and Other Stories and a novel, The Last Lesson of Mrs de Souza. Cyril has served as a mentor under the Creative Arts Programme and the Mentor Access Project, as well as a judge for the Golden Point Awards in Singapore. A past recipient of the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award for Literature, he completed his doctoral degree in English Literature at the National University of Singapore in 2012. His poems have been anthologised in Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (W. W. Norton 2008) and Chinese Erotic Poems (Everyman’s Library 2007).
Sabrin Ahmed
Sabrin Ahmed is a 17 year old Somali girl currently held in Australian Immigration Detention. She has published in The Arrivalists. Her work has been read at poetry gatherings. She is currently writing her life story. She is an honorary member of PEN International.
surroundings of sadness
i see nothing but a fence of tears
young and old are a shadow of life
i can’t go back to the world i once lived in
where bullets and bombs were shared
where many mothers lost their first born
and last born
where many girls were raped
by several men
where many children become orphans
where i lost my dear mother
where my life was threatened
where days and nights my tears came pouring
like rain
where i didn’t have a choice but to run away
with out any guidance
where I put my self in a humble boat
my life at risk again
where i thought i was heading to the right place
at the right time
where my thoughts were full of hopes
and happiness was knocking at my heart
i did not know that i would be locked up in detention
for so long
what have i done to deserve this situation?
is seeking asylum a crime?
what i was looking for is peace and freedom
but now it is far from me
it is like the distance between earth and sky.
Dear Bird Send My Message
Send my humble greetings and love
to people who are struggling
days and night,
who are in every street
protesting,
who are moving earth and heaven
just to help us.
Dear bird send my message.
Send an image of my eyes-
to Abbott-
where tears
are rolling like a river,
send my heart
full of sorrow,
send my mind
full of thoughts,
send him images
of why I came.
Dear bird send my message.
Send my emotions
to Morrison
who is enjoying my pain,
who does not think
that I am a human being
like him,
who thinks
that i am just a number
the waste of population.
Dear bird send my message.
Send my appreciation
and gratitude
to lawyers who fight
for my freedom,
who give me hope
that someday
I will be able
to sleep.
Vesna Goldsworthy
Vesna Goldsworthy (1961, Belgrade) lives in London and writes poetry in English, her third language, as well as her native Serbian, in which her poetry is much-anthologized. Aged twenty-three, she read her poems at a football stadium to an audience of thirty thousand people. She moved to Britain soon afterwards and did not write a line of poetry for over twenty years. Her Crashaw Prize winning debut poetry collection in English, The Angel of Salonika (Salt, 2011) was one of the Times Best Poetry Books of the Year.
Yalta
Everything in the world is really beautiful, everything but our thoughts and actions…
A.P. Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog” (1899)
After they made love that first time
She still felt distant enough to use the formal you
In the first question she posed.
He contemplated the heavy Japanese scent
He helped her choose the day before.
Something less overwhelming, with more zest,
Would have suited Yalta better, now he knew,
Than the red spider lily.
That flower grows, so legend says,
Along the path on which you meet
Someone you will never see again.
He was still naked when he got out of bed
And sat down at the table to cut a slice of watermelon.
His testicles rested on the chair.
The lacquered wood felt pleasantly cool.
They stayed like that for thirty minutes at least.
Her little Pomeranian dog was there too
Watching his mistress, then him,
As he chewed the red flesh in silence.
The two pairs of eyes
Seemed similarly moist in candlelight.
If she were not naked – or not shy –
If she could only fling the window open,
Would they still hear the crashing
Of the waves
In the darkness below,
Like earlier that evening,
A century ago?
Sanssouci
I am old enough to remember
The appearance of Akhmatova’s Requiem,
The ambiguities of Brecht, Brodsky in his prime,
The Wall before it fell, the sound of planes
Taking off and landing. Nearby, another country.
On our long ride to Potsdam
We carved a crescent, a Cyrillic S,
In the first snow of the season,
As we wound our way across
The white spaces on the map,
Along the streets which echoed in Russian
And smelled of coal, cabbage, and wool.
It took years to reassemble
The memory of winter love-making
Undone on the parturition table,
In the encounter of metal and flesh.
The nurse returned with a pack of wadding.
It will cease in a day or two, she said
As though you were, already, absent. Do rest,
Drink some Georgian red, forget.
She straightened the shawl on my shoulders.
Under her uniform, the smell of sweat
Was just like mother’s, the night she was taken.
Our bicycles remained padlocked at the gate.
The brushstrokes of white powder
Emphasised the elegance of bars and chains,
A trail of lines in virgin snow,
To but not from, never returning;
So much blood and nothing
Conceived from so much love.
Of all that betrays us, the gentlest is memory.
Leaving the Party
We walk in silence bearing westwards
Along the towpath, against the current.
The Thames slithers and shimmers
On its slow way to surrender
Exhausted and spread-eagled on the sands of Essex.
Bicycle lights approach and frame us
In milky stills of gelatine silver.
Runners pound by in sweat and lycra,
Their footfall like strange amphibians’ heartbeat,
Mosquito buzz of music rises from their ears.
They give a wide berth to the couple of elderly clowns
In dinner jacket and sequins, carefully treading
With patent leather shoes unsuited to water’s edge.
At one point this evening we seemed unbearably close.
I raised my right hand to touch your temple.
Your hair, your fine hair, your fine white hair
Moved towards my fingers in static electricity.
There again was that question I was about to pose.
Then something behind your unquestionable goodness
Suddenly scared me, like ormolu and woodworm.
The cup of my palm still carries that faint fragrance,
The smoothness of black silk where the hand fell in defeat,
The soft woollen cloth, the white cotton underneath,
All those conspiracies of loom and thread
Expensively constructed to shield and to protect
Your skin, your warm skin, in all its unfamiliar creases.
Mine always feels porous, a layer to be shed,
Though I forever shiver — needing a cover, a shawl, a shelter —
Like some short-lived species of insect, a devil’s darning needle.
The darkness grows. The heat’s abating. I’ll hold myself together.