Patrick Bryson: Schadenfreude

In 2009 Patrick was awarded his PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Newcastle, Australia, where he also taught CW for three years. His thesis, Chasing the Unwritable Book, explored how identity is shaped by mental illness and the fictional possibilities it presents to the author – with a particular focus on autobiographical fiction. He is a published poet, short story writer and essayist, with his chapter on Peter Kocan ‘The Urge to Write and the Urge to Kill’ featuring in Configuring Madness, an anthology released by Rodopi Press, Oxford, last year. After graduation he relocated to Shillong, India, where he has been working on his first novel, “Slouching Towards Petersham.”

 

Schadenfreude

Back in the mid-nineties – before the plucking of nasal hair became a weekly chore – I shared a short intense friendship with Grant, who was, for a time, one of the Drama Department’s most recognisable actors. Humiliating as it is, I admit that I was the other one –  although I consider myself reasonably fortunate; when undergrad life finished, so did my acting career.

I just couldn’t hack it. Finding an agent, turning up for castings and waiting by the phone; it all left me feeling like a beggar. And the nerves made me come across as arrogant and desperate, an undesirable combination for any potential director keen on hiring me. The last gig I had – actually, the only paying gig of my career – was as an extra in a Telstra commercial. I had to walk across a busy street in a group-shot for four hours, trying to look solemn. Ridiculously, I hoped that the producer would note my seriousness – surely more heartfelt than any of the other extras – and discover me. When the costs of the Salvos suit I purchased especially for the shoot were coupled with my train fare to Town Hall and deducted from my $120 fee, I was left with 80 bucks. Averaged over the nine months that I tried to go professional that equals $8.88 per month, or $2.20 a week. If you take out the money I spent going for the other two auditions that I blew – both of them for roles where they needed a tall guy – then we’re down to about 60 bucks, or $1.60 a week. Between that and the bullshit I got from Centrelink, it was better for everyone if I just got a job.

Ensconced in my role as a night-packer at Coles, I ran into Grant one afternoon at Burwood station when I was on my way home from the TAB. We embraced.

Man, how are ya?

How am I? What about you? You crazy fucker.

By that he meant that the last time he saw me at The Northern Star I’d been on acid. He turned to the girl he was with.

You know, like those people you meet and you think you’ll never see them again? He’s one of those guys.

I was a little embarrassed; my white polo shirt didn’t smell great and I hadn’t shaved in a few days. I was also slightly drunk. The girl Grant was with stepped forward and tried to smile, but couldn’t quite pull it off.

When I asked Grant what he’d been up to he said that he’d gotten into NIDA.

Awesome, I said – thinking bastard, arsehole and fuck, fuck, fuck, why not me?

I tried to make my exit as soon as possible, citing my non-existent controlling girlfriend, but he was having none of it.

You’re coming back to our place, man.

At Uni we had both advocated the pursuit of fame and we respected each other for being up front about it, as opposed to our acquaintances who would go on protests with the Wilderness Society, deplore the use of deodorant and spurn anything mainstream, but who all formed grunge bands with the unvoiced desire of becoming groupie-shagging, heroin-snorting, rock gods.

            As we walked along I peppered him with questions about the acting course at NIDA, which was painful but preferable to talking about what I was doing, which at the time involved a lot of masturbation about the middle-aged boilers I was working with, the softening of my belly and the little gambling habit that I had acquired.

            She was the one who broke the spell. 

            So, Peter, what do you do?

            With Grant, I could’ve told the truth. But the look on her face – and the fact that she had casually mentioned she was at NIDA with him – made me lie.

            I write, I said.

            What bullshit. The last thing I’d written was a final essay to complete the BA, a 3000 word puff piece on Lee Strasberg and Method Acting.

            Really? she said. Have you had anything published?

            Not yet.

Well, at least that was true.

            I hated her immediately and she didn’t even think enough of me for that. Back at their digs – a standard two room flat with a PULP FICTION poster, a bong, a bean-bag and a PlayStation – I had to struggle with the cup of tea she made. I asked for a strong one with two sugars; she gave me a milky brew with none.

Grant didn’t notice. All he talked was NIDA, NIDA, NIDA. After the right amount of time and one forced cough from the girl – whose name is deliberately and spitefully forgotten – I bailed and forgot him for the next ten years.

 

·         

 

It was Facebook that brought us back together. I’d Googled him a few times, to see if he’d made it, and the results were inconclusive. His name was listed in a few references to the Sydney Theatre Company – as a spear carrier – and one or two co-op productions, but nothing else. The scarcity of information disappointed me. If he’d snagged a regular TV spot, or had made the leap to feature films, I could have revelled in some really serious envy. Conversely, if his name had drawn a complete blank I’d have toasted his failure and patted myself on the back. The longer you keep the dream alive the thinner the ranks of the hopeful become. 

But there he was in his profile pic, lying on a bed with a baby asleep next to him. Now there was some reality. A baby means responsibilities. It means regular hours, a stable home and lots of the filthy lucre. Maybe he’s given up, I thought. No, I wished.

I didn’t send the request immediately. I’d only just gotten back into it, after having deactivated my account, and this time I intended to be more circumspect with my choice of friend.

So I forgot him again and went back to watching ‘Seductive Asian pussy needs it’ on RedTube.

 

·         

 

At Uni we had been involved in a few productions together. In the show I’m thinking of we saw each other daily for weeks. It was a one-acter that I directed, and Grant had volunteered to be my stage manager. Pretty soon the rumour went round that we were both gay. It’s an easy one to pin on people in the theatre; everyone is either queer or in the closet according to the smoko conversations outside the stage door.

This gossip had a bit more sting to it though, as Grant had only just been in a queer piece and played the love interest of a competitive swimmer. The role required him to get in and snog the other dude. Neither tried to dodge it; both of them went hard and gave it some tongue.  It was a tricky situation for me in the audience. My then girlfriend, Max, was sitting next to me and, as well as being friends with Grant – who we were both there to support – I was acquainted with the other actor. I had cheated on Max with his girlfriend, a well known Goth Queen and devourer of cock. 

So I disliked the other dude anyhow. I can’t remember his name but he was in a band that had a minor alternative hit. At the time I feared that he would come up and make a public scene in front of Max because he knew that I had clumsily fucked his girlfriend at the Bogey Hole.

But he was cool. I was the one who had the problem. When they kissed during the middle of the play I noted a distinct twitch of jealousy from my side – though I told myself then that it was the dread of getting caught cheating – and promptly forgot it.

A few months later, at the after-party for my play, we all went along to the house of the guy that had done the lights. I had scored some pot using the money we had collected from the door – even though it was a Uni production and technically all the cash was supposed to go to the Drama Department – and we all sat back and got royally stoned, except for Grant.

He doesn’t do drugs and he never touches alcohol or coffee. Don’t ask me how the motherfucker survives. Anyway, that night he came along for the ride and acted as the designated driver. Towards the end of the bowl, when the conversation had trickled down to nothing and the eyelids of the smokers had closed to half-way, I noticed Grant looking over towards me.

He caught my gaze and mouthed, Let’s go.

 

·         

 

It was our first sleepover. By that stage he was going out with Max’s older sister, Lynnette, so we should have been seeing even more of each other – but the girls hated the idea. They also hated each other and had endured a fucked-up family situation, with their dad introducing them to domestic violence at an early age.

So we got back to my place in the East End, had a quick cup of tea and then went up to bed. We pulled in the single mattress from the veranda and set it up a few feet from my grimy queen-sized, so there was an acceptable buffer zone.

The talk didn’t last for long before I could feel myself dozing off. I put on some music and closed my eyes. I don’t know if it was the good buzz I had or just the routine of taking a girl back and playing some Mazzy Star, but I felt the urge to reach out the hand at that point, and briefly imagined getting it on with Grant. Yes, I’m pretty sure it moved. I’ve got no idea what he was thinking, or even if he was awake.

Then I slept.

 

·         

 

A few months after I first saw him online, I relented and sent off the friend request. He accepted it straight away and posted ‘Dude!!!!’ on my wall. We arranged for him to come around and my wife, Maya, put on a great spread – rice, daal, chicken curry – with strawberries and cream for dessert.

When he turned up I went out to meet him in the hall. From my vantage point on the third floor I could see him below as he climbed the stairs. That’s when my initial suspicions were confirmed. I thought I’d detected a receding hairline in his profile pics and now, as well as that, I noticed that he’d developed a small bald patch at the back of his skull. This made me very happy. I had to start shaving my head a few years ago, and to see that Grant’s floppy brown hair had started to fall filled me with a delightful satisfaction.

We embraced.

Man, I’m so sweaty, he said. Sorry.

He was carrying a skateboard and had evidently ridden it down the hill from the train station, his Bose head phones hanging from his neck.

Grant, this is Maya.

They shook hands and then Maya went back into the bedroom to read, so we could be alone for a few minutes.

He talked about his kids and his wife.

Like, I’m already the bad guy, he said. The first thing Meg does when the kids muck-up is threaten them with Dad coming into the room.

Once you ask people about their children, forget it. He could have kept going for a long time and I had to be blunt to get him onto the topic of his career.

Are you still acting?

I’ve just finished a touring production of the schools, he said.

Yeah?

Yeah, it’s fucked. Basically it means I’m good at talking to kids about Shakespeare.

What do you do otherwise?

Oh man, you’ll never guess.

What?

I sell Christmas trees.

I laughed.

That doesn’t seem weird at all, I said. It suits you.

And it did. The last time I saw him in Newcastle, before I left for Sydney, Grant had been considering running away with the circus.

How much of the year does that take up? I asked.

Like two months, tops. We deliver the tree, set it up and then dispose of it in January.

You must meet some interesting people, said Maya, who sat down next to me.

It was the perfect thing to say, because it gave him an opportunity to do some impersonations.

I frequently hear the word disaster, he said, when I deliver to these women in the eastern suburbs. And I’m like, Love, the tsunami was a disaster, Rwanda was a disaster, your fucking Christmas tree being flat on one side is not a disaster.

He had to break off and answer the phone at that point – to take an order from a woman in the eastern suburbs who would soon be complaining about the flatness of her tree.

I reminded him of the time we’d met in Burwood, back when he’d first started at NIDA.

That’s right, he said.

What was the name of the girl you were with?

His eyes widened.

Vanessa. There’s a story about her.

Yeah?

Unless she had died I wasn’t really that interested.

Yeah. After one year she got kicked out of NIDA and she left town. Then a little while later I hear that she’s in some pilot in LA and now the show has been going for five seasons and she’s a big star.

Seriously?

Full on. Billboards on Hollywood Boulevard, the whole bit.

You should have stayed with her.

I know, man.

Does your wife act?

She used to.

 

·         

 

In the car, as I drove him back home to Lewisham, he made a lot of references to the times when he’d been in Hamlet and Macbeth.

I mean, I was on the roster for two years, he said.

Despite myself, I was actually starting to feel sorry for him. Then, the revelation I’d been waiting for:

Man, he sighed, I just feel like I’m delaying the inevitable. You know? Each new job I get means that I don’t have to think about giving up for a few more months. And now there is another kid on the way, I dunno.

He trailed off.

I made some noises about how I was also finding it tough, but it wasn’t one of my more convincing performances.

He started talking about a project he was thinking of doing with a couple of mates – a TV series. He was meeting them at the pub to discuss it.

I didn’t press him for details. He was already on his way down to the canvas.

When I stopped the car, he shook my hand and smiled.

I probably won’t see you for another ten years, I said.

Fully, I know. But keep in touch, alright?

Yeah, likewise.

And congratulations, man. Your wife is awesome.

Well, she fed him, so he would say that. He didn’t have to put up with the carrot and stick dance – silent treatment and sex – which always ended with me giving in to her demands.

He closed the door, turned away and then stopped as if he’d just remembered something. He leaned back through the window and looked me in the eyes.

Peter, he said. Good luck, man.

 

·         

 

You know what? The bastard meant it. Almost like we were on shore-leave in the middle of a war, and neither expected the other to survive beyond the next few weeks. That whole afternoon he hadn’t asked much about what I’d been doing, but he got enough to know that I hadn’t given up and that I intended to go the distance.

Meanwhile, as I drove away, I realised that he’d have a much better rebirth than me. You see, I was happy that he had kids and no money. I drew strength from the fact that he was a failing actor losing his hair, that he had almost packed it in and that he had to deliver Christmas trees every December. It meant I had won.

Then, as I indicated and took the Neutral Bay Exit, this thought occurred to me: I will never forget him.

 

 

 

Alex Kuo: Bitter Melons

 

Trans-Pacific writer and photographer Alex Kuo’s most recent books are White Jade and Other Stories, and Panda Diaries.  His Lipstick and Other Stories won the American Book Award, and recently he received received the Alumni Achievement award from Knox College.

 

 

 

Bitter Melons

for PK Leung

Sixty years ago this was my universe where I lived and played, mostly by myself.  Now I was back as an impatient and sweaty tourist from another postcolonial country some three thousand miles away bursting in air, as if I were late for a meeting, a bumpy voice recorder hitched to my waist.  Despite the massive land use alterations resulting from the political reclamation and entrepreneurial ventures, actually I knew exactly where I was, headed home by a series of diagonal crossings and trespassing shortcuts.  Or more correctly, where home was, in the last apartment building on that hill, there on a short street ending at the backside of the Royal Observatory where its seasonal typhoon signals were visible to every mariner in the harbor of this crown colony under King George VII, Number Ten being the severest.
           Most of the old buildings had disappeared, and the vegetation as well, including the expansive banyan trees, now replaced by an occasional bauhinia bush planted to reverse the racial and political hegemony.  Though I may not have known exactly who I was at that jostled moment, I knew precisely where I was in time, and I was in a hurry.  Here, the Chanticleer bakery with its fresh, creamy napoleons—across the street from the Argyll Highlanders and the most-feared Royal Gurkha Rifles garrison—next the comic book and film magazine stand, both temptations on the walk home from the Immaculate Conception elementary school where I learned to tuck slide into second base, demonstrated one recess by an eager Canadian nun in flowing white habit.
         Here the trek was interrupted by a residential development of infinite small houses, each with its narrow stone steps leading to doors of equally colorless homes, except for their sky-blue trim.  Several men suddenly appeared, including one who looked Indian with a full turban, even when his skin was too light.  They wanted to know what I was looking for, Torpedo Alley, they called their neighborhood in Chinese without smiling.  But I knew better, they were fooling me, looking at the harbor some two hundred feet in elevation below us.  It was clear they did not want me there, now as well as sixty years ago.  So I explained that as a writer I was not balanced, I had just lost my way to the ferry terminal.  The Indian or Pakistani man said he understood, since his wife was also a writer, of novels, he said, his eyes still a patch of doubt, and pointed, downhill first, then to the right.
          Clutching my recorder then, I went downhill first, but once out of their sight around the next corner, I turned onto a muddy field where several pages were missing.  Gone were the small houses and concrete sidewalk.  Instead, sparse vegetable plots garnished the landscape from edge to edge.  Two men in their thirties came up from one of them, though I knew they were really in their eighties, because as witness I could identify them, coming around every afternoon collecting metal, glass or paper they’d sell for recycling, rain or shine.  
          One of them pointed down to a row of garlic stems by his feet and said it was his.  He directed his finger to the next row and said these fat cabbages were his friend’s.  Then he said the last row of tiny, dark green bitter melons belonged to both of them, tendered most carefully, even in the wet and windy summer typhoon season, to keep them from rotting, he added at the end as I continued downhill to the ferry terminal.
           By this time the men from Torpedo Alley had caught up with me and my transformational tricks in hallucination or dream.  Like their security predecessors, they scolded me and escorted me to the gate, just when I was perfectly balanced on a high banyan limb.  I used to live near here, some sixty years ago, I was sure of it.
            Look here, at the Star Ferry terminal then, I skipped the Morning Star and the Meridian Star and waited for the Celestial Star for the crossing.  In my hands the recorder clutched the words to the missing pages that I call home.

 

Luke Johnson

Luke Johnson’s stories have been published in HEAT, Going Down Swinging and Island. He is a PhD student at University of Technology, Sydney and has taught creative writing at University of Wollongong. He lives in Mt Keira with his wife and son.

 

 

 

A Near-Death Interruption

So I hanged myself. From the cherrywood bookcase in your study. Where you used a silk cravat and volumes one through to six of The complete works of William Shakespeare, I used a length of rope and three-rung aluminium stepladder. It was not a sexualised thing, mine. That is to say, I was not waxing lyrical with my piece in my hand at the time and there was no pantyhose crotch pulled down to my nostrils or soiled undergarment stuffed into the foyer of my oesophagus. No, it was just a regular morbid suicide attempt, with all of my clothes on and none of anybody else’s. Yours, you old romantic you, was slightly more playful.

            Strange word this hanged, before I go any further. Strange both connotatively and syntactically. Connotatively, it insists completion of deed, success of task, it insists death, does it not? But why? I mean, that I persevered where you perished, does this somehow imply I did not hang? Of course I hanged (syntactically the word shows all the deference of a fourteen year old wielding a can of spray-paint). Believe you me I hanged. I felt the lead in my veins rushing to fill my toes, the mercury in my eyeballs swishing side to side like the water inside two precariously-placed fishbowls. Hey, not only did I hang, but I also swung (swing, now there is a teenager who knows how to conjugate respectfully). I swung and hanged as you must have swung and hanged, without rhythm and without breath. Like a starfish. Back and diagonal. Forthways and sideways. A real swinger and hanger, me. A real chip off the old echinodermic block.

            After cutting me down, hanged though defiantly alive, they rushed me to A&E, where a white-haired doctor was impatient and cold-handed and an auburn-haired nurse played pretty and flirtatious. Not flirtatious with me so much, I was in no state to reciprocate her winks and pouts anyway, but with the ambulance driver who had brought me in certainly. The two of them waited for the doctor to finish his examination, then together they lifted me off the ambulance gurney and onto another bed with wheels. ‘He must have pissed himself after he passed out,’ the debonair driver whispered intimately while she his silver-time-piece-chested lover took count of my pulse and wiggled her button nose. Oh it was sweet being at the centre of their lovesick innuendos, and I must say, father, the smell of my soiled woollen trousers did not embarrass or cause me any special concern, not after seeing what you did to the back seat of those fishnet stockings, you old dog.

            After only a short period of lying around like this mother arrived at the hospital. You remember mother, right?

‘You tried to hang yourself?!’ Part question, part exclamation. As difficult to separate as the Catholicism and Spanishness. If forced I should guess the exclamation portion of it belonged mostly to tried and Spain, and the question portion mostly to Jesus and hang.

‘Is that what they have told you?’ I replied coolly. This, after all, was a public hospital in Taunton, father, and no place for me to be acting all sulky now, not in front of such noble creatures as this nurse and her driver, working on a pittance as I am sure they were. ‘Well, okay, if that is what they have told you then. Did they mention the bit about me pissing myself also?’ I could see the hurt in mother’s eyes and wanted to let the ink run. Oh, the magnificent blueness of it.

 ‘Is this the kind of boy I have raised?’ she responded quietly, putting her hands to her chest to fondle that cleavage-stricken Christ of hers as she was prone to doing in times of distress, like some clean-necked virgin fending off a house of vampires with nothing but her clever little talisman. ‘The kind who would try such a thing as this? To hang himself? Hang himself!’ With the second hang she turned away from me and tugged down on the Christ with such force its silver chain could only sharpen the briefest line across the back of her neck before snapping clean in half. For a moment I though she might have been weeping. Then she swung back to face me, still clutching in her tight little fist that miniature figure who would not have looked out of place between the letters S and U. ‘Not to mention poor Marcella. Tell me you are not so selfish you would attempt such a thing.’

I was impervious. ‘Must we go on about Marcella?’ I yawned. ‘The woman really should start knocking before entering a room. The sound of a knot tightening around a neck must ring in her ears like some kind of high-pitched dog whistle.’

Mother moved to slap me but stopped herself. ‘You would mock your father like this?’ she scolded beneath her breath. ‘Talking about his accident like some funny joke. In front of any-old person.’

 ‘Yes, father’s accident.’ I looked past mother and at the nurse, who in turn looked past me and at the driver. She may have even winked to him: code of course, for, How about a handjob in the janitor’s, my love? The two of them left the room hurriedly then and it was just mother and I. Allowing the sarcasm to inflect my voice with its nasally undertones and offbeat emphases, I continued. ‘That accidental morning in accidental August. What an accidental shame it was.’

This time mother’s hand connected well with my cheek, the Christ getting his own piece of the retribution too. ‘That you would even dream.’ The jolt of the slap frightened me only half as much as it frightened her, I think. You must remember, father, this is the woman who used to eroticise me into syrupy slumbers by smearing her own areolas with honey, her little Alberry and custard dumpling—just look at him suck himself to sleep! And now, thirty-seven years on, showing more concern for the fragile disposition of the cleaner than for her own lacteal kin—what heartbreak!

I touched the stung spot with the back of my hand. ‘Yes, poor Marcella and her poor sweet cleaner lady’s life. And poor father too. Poor you and poor me, while I am at it. And rest assured, mother, none of it is true.’ Lies, lies, lies. ‘They have confused me for one of the other boys on the ward. Hang myself? I was only trying to gratify myself sexually. I swear it. It is a Briton’s pastime. I will show you the rope burn on my penis if you do not believe me. A boy like me getting mixed up in a thing like suicide! Even when Laudie left me, even then I did not contemplate putting a noose around my neck for the purpose of killing myself. Not to mention death being the most thorough talent scout there is, mother. If I had shown potential for a thing like suicide, then believe you me, death would have sniffed me out at a very early age, set me up for life, scholarship and all. No this is just a case of pushing the boundaries of perversion too far. The apple and the tree and all that proximity talk. Oh, please do apologise to Marcella for me. What a dreadful mix-up.’

Mother looked at me, studied me. And then she huffed. And then she left the room. And smiling, I went to sleep.

 

An hour or so later I awakened to find in mother’s place a woman whose makeup promised to outlast her face, whose foundation alone seemed heavy enough to negatively preserve her features for at least another three hundred years, to a time when Western Europe’s frescos will be dissolved into camera-flash oblivion and the gothic clocks of Bavaria cried for like the felled trees of fictitious Amazonia. And in place of my woollen trousers, father, complementing the shift from mother’s moody toddler to psychiatrist’s prized patient quite well, I think, a sort of plastic-legged skirt with these built-in elastic-legged pantaloon thingies.

            ‘Your admission card says Albert,’ Tutankhamen’s lovechild insisted. I do not remember for how long we had been arguing the point. Though I do recall that at one juncture she even went so far as to show me where the name had been filled in: Albert Dean Childes, silent s and all.

            ‘It is an error,’ I explained to her.

            ‘Not according to your mother, Albert.’

            ‘According to my mother my uncle is the rightful king of Denmark. Who are you going to believe?’

            ‘Do you think this kind of talk impresses me, Albert?’

            ‘Hamlet,’ I corrected her. She said nothing. I went on. ‘No, I do not suppose so. Would you be more impressed if I told you the real king of Denmark wore ladies’ stockings and used lipstick in place of Vaseline?’

            She stood up and moved her chair slightly closer to me. Or perhaps she did not move it any closer at all, but rather just stood up and sat down again to give the impression of having moved closer. Either way, I found myself near enough to identify each swamped hair follicle now. Her eyelashes looked like they had endured the most recent Exxon disaster. Her upper lip was a Puerto Rican mudslide. 

            ‘I know all about what happened to your father, Albert.’ She seemed to be whispering at me.

            ‘You like to remind people of their names, don’t you, doctor?’ I deepened my voice, doing my best to match her gravity.

            ‘Now, I never said I was a doctor, Albert. If you must know I hold an Honours degree from the University of Warwick and a Masters from Somerset.’

            I frowned. Felt played. Found myself yearning for mother who wore her heart and diploma on her sleeve.

            ‘Albert, you are not expected to be unmoved by what happened to your father.’ She put her hand on the bed, next to my shoulder, to assure me some. She seemed to know you so well, father, know all of your moves. What if she had leaned forward next and rubbed her cleanly-shaven chin against my forehead, to kiss me good night? Would I have begun sucking my thumb and wet myself a third time?

            ‘Unmoved, why of course not,’ I said to her. And to some degree, meant it too. It was after all quite a shock to us, father, to learn of the promiscuous double life you had invented for yourself. When we found you, the tip of your penis was squeezed out through the top end of your fist like a tongue between two pursed lips, and the pearly sequins on the fronts of your stiletto heels shone up at us like droplets of you-know-what. And whatever shade of lipstick that was, smeared around the edges of that makeshift orifice, well, mother has refrained from restocking her supply—from wearing lipstick altogether in fact. The poor woman, since your death her lips have taken the semblance of a pair of mating slugs just doused in salt. You know what else, father? I cannot help but wonder whether the whole scene was not staged for mother’s benefit in the first place, aimed at notifying her of some sexual underperformance on her part. That you went so far as to make a face of your fist. Nothing subtle about that. Tell me I am not on to something.

            ‘It must have been very distressing. Your mother tells me it was your aunt who discovered him.’

            ‘It is an affectation,’ I said to the Master of Psychology graduate with her hand upon the mattress beside my left shoulder. ‘Marcella is not really my aunt. Just a cleaner.’

            ‘She seems to care for you a great deal. She was here earlier while you were sleeping.’

            ‘Did she try to tip anything in my ear? That is how she did father, you know? She has been with us a very long time, but is completely untrustworthy.’

            ‘Your mother tells me you were homeschooled, Albert.’

            I nodded. Silently. I did not dare speak in fear of divulging information on the chivalrous suicide vow I had made to an already-spoken-for Beatrice during our grade-three reading of La Vita Nova, father. Sure evidence of my long-term psychological state.

            Continuing unprompted, ‘Your father was in charge of your education? Or your mother?’

            ‘My father taught me the humanities and sciences, and my mother the guidelines for a healthy soul. Neither was in charge. A person’s education is his own charge.’ I was churning it out now.

            ‘And your father was a professor too. At Somerset. I remember him from one of my own classes, would you believe?’

            ‘Some kind of professor, yes.’

‘A very clever man.’

            ‘With an ear for trouble.’

            ‘Hmm,’ she said. Then, ‘I would like permission to speak with your wife, Albert.’

            ‘My wife is deceased,’ I told my interrogator.

            ‘That is not what your mother has told me.’

            ‘My mother was in charge of discipline, if that is what you mean by in charge. Though she was a forgiving disciplinarian. If father sent me to her for corporal punishment, then she would close the door and beat on a cushion and I would moan in time with each stroke. She stopped smearing honey on her teats when I was two.’

            ‘We are talking about your wife now, Albert.’

            ‘Is it important?’

            ‘Very.’

‘Yes, poor Laudie,’ I said. ‘She drowned in a terrible house fire, you know. It makes me too sad to mention. Sorry I cannot be of more help. I have long suspected her brother of foul play. A chap with washboard abdominals.’

            She gave me a stern smile. Her nose might have fallen to ruins along with a swag of other famous decayed noses, led of course by the Sphinx (the answer is man! I thought to yell). ‘Okay, Albert, I will visit you again later this evening. We must talk seriously before I can allow you to leave. It is necessary for my report. You see me carrying my reports, don’t you?’

            ‘I see nothing I am not supposed to see.’

            But that was not entirely true either, father. From my bed beside the window I could see the advertisement for the cheap carpet warehouse pasted on the back of the bus shelter down below. Some stand-in with a cartoonish face who had been paid to put on a pair of tights and pose himself in a manner befitting the tagline To carpet or not to carpet? That is the question. You will agree, father, it is a disgrace the way they exploit the classics like that.

 

 

 

Maria Takolander

Maria Takolander’s poetry, fiction and essays have been widely published. She is the author of a book of poems, Ghostly Subjects (Salt, 2009), which was shortlisted for a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award in 2010. She is also the winner of the 2010 Australian Book Review Short Story Competition. She is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies and Creative Writing at Deakin University in Geelong.
 

 

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Night has settled through the house like silt. My bedroom is as dark as my nursery memory of it, as dark as my child brain, which is only beginning to build an image of the world inside my skull cave. The plaster walls are what I remember the most, although I think of them not in terms of paint colour or wall paper but only in terms of their hidden chalkiness and how they persist in the shadows. I remember, too, the framed cavity where the door hangs open to the darkness of the hallway, and the draped space where the window is allowed to exist untroubled by day. I remember nothing about the furnishings, although I assume—or is this a memory?—that in the room there is a foam mattress and bedclothes colourless as the walls. And I assume that I am on that bed, too, although I cannot see myself or feel myself on it. It is as if I do not exist in the world. It is as if I am like the shadows. But I know that I exist because I know that, out there, beyond my bedroom door, something terrible is happening.

            My sister, barefoot in her synthetic, pale-pink nighty, appears in my room, body-real and dangerous, urging me to leave with her, to come and help, even though I am not really there, even though I will never want anything less. Are there words for this child-whispering, for the flesh-and-blood crumbs she holds out to me, compelling me to come out of hiding, to cross the threshold into witnessing and remembering?

            Sometimes I think that the memory belongs to her and that she gave it to me, like a birthday cake, at a later time. But I must own this memory in some original way because I remember the warmth of her hand. I feel how her nylon nighty hides electricity as she leads me down the hallway, dense with night. And I see how the floorboards and wall in the hallway ahead, outside the entranceway to the lounge room, are striped by the streetlight entering through the Venetian blinds. I find myself remembering that, on some other night, strange men with shaved heads and tight jeans had gathered on the street outside the lounge room in packs and that a brown bottle had crashed through the window, tangling in the still-broken blinds. Another evening in the lounge room, abruptly littered with gifts, I had unwrapped a tin of colouring pencils next to the white figure of a tree fit for a storm.

            At the end of the hallway, past the striped light, there is a bedroom with its door ajar, behind which there appears to be a movie screening. I can tell by the yellow light streaming through the crack of the door and the loud voices and the skin noise that it is an adult movie, not a movie I want to see, not like the one about Mary Poppins, who has a friend—the smiling chimney sweep—and an umbrella like a lollipop with which to steal me away into the spangled night.

My sister, in her synthetic, pale-pink nighty, moves down the hallway towards the bedroom, pulling me behind her. When she reaches the bedroom door, with the vertical stripe of yellow light beaming along the door jamb and the movie playing inside turned suddenly quiet, she lets go of my hand. I watch as she touches the painted surface of the door with her fingertips. Then, from my position behind her night-gowned body and her outstretched arm, as the electric light, like radiation, floods her face, I look at what she is looking at. And I see what is on.

            There is a naked light bulb and a mirror, gilded and tricky, on the wall above a double bed that has a threadbare, purple coverlet. And there is a man kneeling on the rumpled, purple coverlet with his back to me. The blonde hair on the back of his head, which I can see directly in the bright room, is matted, and his face, which I can see in the shining space of the mirror, is flattened. His fists, which I look at in the glinting mirror and then in the luminous room, are clenched by his sides.

            My sister, standing in the frame of the door in front of me, lit up like a shard of glass by the sun, says something. She opens her lips and makes a sound. She says his name. She says it in a voice so small that it could be me who is saying it.

            The man turns, the yellow light bulb setting his face aglow. He is in the room, and he is in the mirror. He looks strange: empty or full. I wonder if there is a man behind his eyes. I am afraid, but he does not see me among the shadows. He looks at my sister in her pink nighty and in her skin, and she glimmers and burns while he flares and blazes like a fire lapped by the wind. When his mouth opens, he roars and leaps from the bed. The light is shattering.

            The door slams shut.

            I see a gush of air puff my sister’s hair and nightgown, and then suddenly there is my face and body cast like the living into the ashes of the night. I am aware of my skin and the way it covers my flesh and bones and of something else—strange, jagged and quiet—embedded within. But only after I glimpse, in all that razing light, a woman’s body—adult words: torso, arms, legs—on the purple coverlet, and a white, cotton nightgown—private word, child word: nighty, nighty—ripped on the floor.

 

*

 

Afternoon has settled through the house like a ghost of the day. I am older—just a little—and this is a room that I remember. I have hidden under the bed with the threadbare, purple coverlet, lying on my stomach on the dust-covered floorboards, feet to the headboard and the wall. The mirror, I know, is hanging above there, its depths swallowing light, but it helps that I cannot see it and that it cannot see me.

            What I can see, straight ahead of me, are the tapered, timber legs at the end of the bed, and the dangling, ragged fringes of the purple coverlet. I can also see the fourth and last drawer of a timber-laminated dressing table that occupies the wall at the foot of the bed. One of the handles on the bottom drawer is missing, and although I do not like the bronze shapeliness of the one that is there, I dislike even more the two, dark screw-holes in the timber where the handle was once attached. Between the bed and the dressing table is a stretch of clean floor, but beneath the dressing table is dust, so still, like a held breath, that the mirror cannot see it. There are maroon curtains to the right, hovering just above the varnished boards, with dust hidden beneath them, too, and a tall cupboard to the left, which is made of heavy timber and has doors that do not properly close. The hallway is also to the left, and I can see its emptiness through the open bedroom door.

            I am not alone. I have, clenched in my arms, squashed between my body and the floor, a toy clown. It is as big as me and so floppy in its limbs and neck that it might be broken. The fabric is felt-like and yellow-coloured where there is skin. It has yellow wool for hair, and its eyebrows and mouth are made from white sausage-shaped pieces of material. It has crosses in the place of eyes, sewn in inch-long, blue, woolen stitches, and it is clothed in a jumpsuit, which is fastened to its body at the ankles, wrists and neck and made from flannel patterned with images of children’s blocks, each with letters of the alphabet.

            The clown feels misshapen and fragile tangled beneath my body and in my crossed arms, but I am trying not to move, and I believe, in any case, that I will not be waiting here long. I breathe lightly through my nose so as not to disturb the yellow wool of the clown’s hair, which sticks out through my arms, or the dust on the floor in front of my face. I watch the vacant hallway through the frame of the open door.

            I have since been told—perhaps after looking at a photograph album, in which I remember seeing a badly lit image of myself on a vinyl kitchen chair with the clown in my arms—that I carried the clown everywhere with me as a child, until the day its head broke away from its torso and clots of wadding started to fall out. I know that the toy was pressed, as I slept one night, into one of the plastic bins crowded with shapeless rubbish bags in the dark, narrow yard at the side of the house. But I can remember having the toy clown with me only one other time.

            I was squatting with my sister in the backyard in the shadow of the grey paling fence. The grass there was lush and long. There were crickets, black and sleek, clinging to the blades of grass, and cobwebs packed in the crevices of the old fence like stuffing. I had my clown with me, bunched under one of my arms. My sister had her clown with her, too. We were listening to three children, older than both of us, playing on a trampoline on the other side of the fence. I remember that I wanted to look at them and that I wanted them to look at me, with a desire I felt in my crouched body as if it had been invaded by a stranger, reckless and ready to be unmasked. But climbing the fence was my sister’s idea.

            Standing next to her, with my toes on the middle rail of the fence and my fingers curled over the splintered wood of the top rail, I held my silence. My clown hung beside me, one of its yellow, fabric hands trapped between my hand and the rough timber of the fence. My sister had her clown with her, too, folded under her left arm. She peered over the ragged edges of the palings. I raised myself on my toes and peered over, too.

            I saw three dark-haired and bare-footed children on a trampoline in an otherwise empty backyard that looked much like ours. There was a fat girl, curled into a ball in the centre of the trampoline mat, and two boys, who were older than her. They were trying to make her bounce. The girl saw me and sat up. Her brothers then stopped and looked. They said things in a language I did not understand, but I recognised the slow smile on the girl’s face and the boys’ too-loud laughter, and I was glad that the worn fence was there, marking the edges of the known world. I climbed back down, and my sister climbed down after me. As I stood on the cool grass, holding the hand of my clown, there was nothing to be said. I remember the feeling of loneliness that comes with shame, that I looked to the dark windows of my house, but there my memory fails.

             My memory of the day that I lay under the bed with the purple coverlet, with my clown tucked in my arms, is clearer. I am waiting for my sister to come home from her first day at school.

            The hallway remains empty. The dust beneath the dressing table in front of me does not move. I look at the two, dark screw-holes in the veneered timber of the bottom drawer, where the bronze handle is missing. I think about the mirror on the wall above the bed, and I find that I am suddenly unsure.

            Should my sister be home by now? I no longer understand why I came to hide under the bed. Do I want my sister to come looking for me, or am I afraid that she will?

I hold the clown tightly and keep still, but I feel that I have been robbed of something, as if the mirror had been looking at me all this time after all.

 

*

 

The morning arrives with a dusky silence. With my sister, I walk down the hallway, past the empty lounge room with the damaged Venetian blinds, to the bedroom at the end. The maroon curtains are still drawn, the mirror, in the dimness, is closed onto itself, and the bed with the purple coverlet is unmade. The knotted fringes of the coverlet trail on the naked floorboards, and in the murkiness of the room they look like the legs of so many large spiders, all dead.

            I do not know what time it is, but I have been going to school for some months now—my sister for more than a year—and I understand what I have to do. I begin to get dressed. There is enough light coming through the curtain parting to enable me to see what I am doing. In the tall cupboard with the doors that cannot close, I find the short slip-dress with the blue swirling pattern, like marble, which I especially like, and a pair of white shoes. My sister chooses an orange dress with buttons. On the dressing table, there is a tube of lipstick, a bottle of mascara, a compact with three colours of eye-shadow—green, blue-green and blue—and a small round mirror with a retractable silver stand. I do not look at the dark mirror on the wall behind.

            Before I leave for school, my sister makes us both lunch in the kitchen, buttering four slices of black bread, which she pulls out of the plastic bag left on the table. I put my sandwich in my handbag. We leave the house, my sister making sure to close the front door behind us, and walk down the driveway. We pass the line of khaki-coloured succulents, which seep pus when the leaves snap, and turn onto the cement footpath. As we walk past our neighbour’s house, a squat woman in a smock, with curlers in her netted hair, rushes out from behind a screen door and across her front lawn. She grabs me by my wrist and my sister by her forearm. She looks at me as if I have forgotten something.

            And it is true that I have, for while I remember what happened that morning, I remember little of the preceding night. I assume, for instance, that there was a drive home from the hospital along streets fire-lit by headlights. I should be able to remember the private feeling of being in the backseat of the car in my dressing gown and, when I got home, the glow of the porch light and the sound of scoria under the tyres. Did I click on the bear-shaped night light on the floor next to my mattress when I got back into bed? Did I ask my sister to sleep with me then?

            But I remember nothing of the events that occurred after—or before—I saw the woman on a trolley, its wheels dark as ash and uneasy on the vinyl floor, disappear down the yawing hallway under the fluorescent lights of the hospital corridor, and the man with the blonde hair re-enter the waiting room, looking at the wall.

 

Alan Gould

Alan Gould has published twenty books, comprising novels, collections of poetry and a volume of essays. His most recent novel is The Lakewoman which is presently on the shortlist for the Prime Minister’s Fiction Award, and his most recent volume of poetry is Folk Tunes from Salt Publishing. ‘Works And Days’ comes from a picaresque novel entitled The Poets’ Stairwell, and has been recently completed.

 

 

 

 

 

Works And Days

 

Now and then throughout the night, other coaches arrived at this depot, passengers disgorged, bought coffee at the all-night stall, returned to their seats, whereupon with a growl, their vehicles departed, for Athens, Istanbul, Skopje, Sofia.  Henry and I returned to our seats, dozed upright, bought further coffees, waited for what the Turks might do.  Dawn came up, strobe-yellow from behind the angular roofline, the disco closed down, and in the early light, now resembled any old garage. But our two feckless Turkish drivers had vanished along with their plump Greek girls and the hundreds of spectral dancers we had glimpsed under the blue lights. As it became clear some fraud had been practiced on us and we were not going on to Athens, one by one our fellow passengers took their bags from the lockers and dispersed into the industrial town.

            ‘What’s the verb from ‘feckless,’ I tilted to Henry.

            ‘Well and truly fecked,’ he rejoined, hoisting his pack. And we went looking for a roof.

            We found a room in Thessalonika quite quickly, but the city promised to be tedious for an enforced stay. Here were shopwindows displaying lathes, compressors, saw-benches, a workaday town without a historic relic in sight. By late morning we had wandered to the waterfront, where we met Martha.

            There was a wharf, and a Greek woman thrashed a squid against the timbers. Behind her the Aegean resembled hammered tin. To one side were monstrous derricks and several bright container ships. The day was warm and the scene was held by a complete inertia but for the woman’s exertions with her squid. Some loafers sat on bollards, watching her or minding a fishing line. And there was also the American girl who had been on our Istanbul coach, regarding the treatment of the squid with evident dismay. Hup! And thunk!

            ‘Like, I know they gotta eat,’ she said, seeing Henry and I approach.

            ‘It loosens the guts, I suppose,’ I offered.

            ‘That is still one helluva way to treat a squid.’

            ‘You’re probably right.’

            We all three watched. This American girl was solidly built with short blonde hair and small eyes that now showed an expression of affront. Indeed I wondered whether she intended to intervene on behalf of the squid. If she did there would be a scene, and this, I recognized, would disappoint me because I found the Greek woman’s heave and slap rather magnificent. Here was someone putting her whole being into the simple domestic task. Up flew her arm with the long, glistening squid at the end of it. Then with an undulation that ran from squid-tentacle to human ankle, down came the creature with a forward jerk of the woman’s torso, a bounce of her ample bosom and a resounding crack as the squid hit the boards. Hup and smack! Hup and smack!  I thought of Eva, and how she would have relished this turning of task into dance, immemorial.

            ‘One helluva way to treat a squid!’

            Henry had watched the spectacle, then lost interest and gone to the wharf edge where he gazed at the oily sway of the sea. But for our different reasons the American and I remained transfixed.

            ‘I concede I’d prefer gentler treatment for my own insides if I was being prepared for a meal.’

            ‘I’m thinking of that squid,’ she dismissed my attempt at charm.

             ‘Actually, I find this rather a thrilling sight.’

            Hup and smack, hup and smack, and the Greek woman a silhouette against the glary Aegean behind her!

             ‘O sure thing! It’s ethnic as hell.’ 

             ‘And beautiful in its way.’

            ‘It’s still one helluva…’ and she shook her head, leaving the sentence unfinished, distressed by the sight, unable to tear herself away.

            When I made to rejoin Henry, I found she had followed me. ‘May I tag along awhile?’ she asked. ‘I’m kinda lonesome right now.’

 ‘Of course,’ I agreed, and learned that she was Martha from Muncie, Indiana, where

she practiced as a plumber. I saw she had big hands and long fingers.  ‘Boon&Luck,’ I introduced ourselves. ‘Both poets,’ I owned.

           ‘You say that’s your livelihood?’ asked Martha. ‘That’s weird.’

           ‘Not livelihood,’ I allowed. ‘Somewhere between an aspiration and a place in history.’

            ‘History? Speak for yourself,’ Henry interposed.

            ‘I don’t get any of this,’ said Martha. ‘You gotta have a livelihood.’

            ‘Poetry is a kind of money,’ Henry was prompt to supply the Stevens, which left Martha further bewildered.

            ‘And you…um… plumb?’ I asked.

            ‘You getta lotta treeroots and sick smells come out of a job,’ Martha brought our conversation to earth.  ‘But sometimes I get to do a course on plastics or the latest hydraulic theory. I never grew outta liking being in school.’

            ‘What brings you to Greece?’ Henry asked.

            ‘I got kinda itchy for some of the things I learned back in school.’

            ‘Like?’

            ‘Like, well, that war they had with the Trojans. I’ve just come from there. And like, all those Gods and Goddesses having ding dongs with each other.’

            At a waterside café, we took coffee, then some lunch. Martha did most of the talking, about her visit to the Troy diggings at Hissarlik. It was a methodical presentation, but something in this person brought out a kindliness and patience in Henry that I might not have expected. We wandered further down the waterfront, retraced our steps and found ourselves back beside the Greek woman, now resting from her squid-thrashing, her galvanized bucket containing a mash of several squid at her side.

            ‘I kinda think I’ve seen this town enough,’ Martha stated. ‘I don’t like discos and bad ladies and someone smashing hell out of a poor squid. When you travel, you come across places that kinda have no poetry I guess.’

            ‘On the contrary!’

            We both glanced at Henry who held his body poised with conviction, like a heron that has just seized a minnow.   ‘Everywhere you look you can see a town saturated with Hesiod.’

            ‘What’s Hesiod?’ asked Martha.

            ‘A poet,’ I knew enough to explain.

            Henry might have given us dates, a lifestory, but instead he advised us to check out Works and Days. ‘Hesiod’s your boy for tool shops and working women of one sort or another.’

            ‘I don’t know that guy,’ Martha decided, her attention drifting back to the tub of mashed squid and her face clouding as she did so.

            ‘Do you believe in the dignity of honest labour?’ I should say that Henry was positively firing his questions. 

             ‘I guess.’

             ‘Protestant work ethic, etcetera.’

             ‘Of course,’ Martha glanced at her interrogator with sudden suspicion. ‘I belong to our church.’

             ‘Good. Well, the Protestant work ethic is pure Hesiod.’

             ‘Hesiod was a Protestant?’

              ‘Absolutely,’ Henry nodded with that grave deliberation indicating he was having fun.

             ‘I didn’t know that,’ Martha pondered this new information. ‘At school I learned about Socrates and hemlock,’ she decided to risk.

             ‘Hesiod is pre-Socratic.’

             ‘And yet he’s a Protestant?’

             ‘Absolutely.’ 

             ‘I don’t get that.’

             ‘Do you think present times are degenerate in comparison to a past golden age?’

            This caused Martha to take her eyes off the squid bucket and look at Henry’s intent, mischievous face reflectively. ‘I sometimes have a gut feeling that things are coming kinda unstuck these days,’ she conceded at length.

              ‘Mankind has a golden, silver and iron age – in that order?’

             ‘I guess we all think that deep down.’

             ‘Then Hesiod’s your boy for things coming unstuck.’

             ‘So he’s important, right?’

            ‘He’s critical,’ Henry affirmed for her. ‘Final question!’ and my companion poet was not quite able to hide his smirk, ‘Do you like the poetry of Robert Frost?’

             ‘Of course! Frost is a great poet. He is taught at school.’

             ‘Frost’s poetry could not have existed had there been no Hesiod.’

              Martha’s brow furrowed at this connection. ‘I don’t get that either.’

             ‘Poets of a present age learn to speak by taking in the speech of poets from an earlier age.  It is a process identical with how infants learn to speak by absorbing the speech of their parents. Frost is a pastoral poet because Hesiod established the territory of pastoral poetry.’

             ‘That’s kinda neat.’

             ‘It is very neat indeed,’ Henry trumped. 

            ‘I thought Frost was a pastoral poet because he liked writing about his farm,’ I ventured to check the progress of the lesson.

             ‘The farm was incidental,’ Henry could not disguise his smirk. ‘The farm was inert without earlier text to animate its possibilities of meaning.’

             ‘I guess this Hesiod must have been quite some guy,’ declared Martha.

             ‘He was,’ said Henry. ‘For instance he advised people not to urinate where the sun can see you.’

             ‘I can see that makes sense,’ Martha the plumber nodded, willing to be taken along now, for all that the information came at such headlong pace.

             ‘Hesiod discouraged people from telling lies simply for the sake of making talk….’

             ‘Ri-ight,’ Martha was not sure how this one related to being a poet.

              ‘…Which is to say’ Henry continued headlong, ‘we have a poet at the dawn of poetry who understood the pathology of people who get nervous in conversation.’

             ‘I get nervous like that,’ Martha brightened at the recognition. ‘I get kinda muddled and blurt, and then falsehoods come out.’

              ‘Exactly,’ Henry clinched. ‘Hesiod also said that sometimes a day can be your stepmother. And sometimes a day can be your mother.’

            ‘I think that one just gets me confused,’ she decided. Nonetheless I could see she was intrigued by the proposition.

            ‘So you see, Hesiod tackles the gut issues,’ Henry summed up. ‘You must read Hesiod at your earliest opportunity.’

            ‘I guess I’ll do that.’ 

            She had been distracted entirely from the squid-bucket now. So had I.  And once again Henry had performed according to his genius. He had taken the substance of books and brought it to thrilling life. Yes, I would re-read Hesiod at the earliest opportunity, now that print on a page was somehow made vibrant, as the blades of light scintillant on the sea beside us, as the gleam of the squid in their galvanized bucket.

            We strolled the waterfront. Henry moved us from Hesiod to Heraclitus and the pre-Socratics. Thales, with his view that the underlying substance of reality was water, was a plumber’s gift that Henry did not neglect to present to Martha. We took an early dinner of moussaka and retsina at a waterside café, walked some more in order to tackle Pythagoras, then parted, Martha to her tent at a campsite, Henry and I to the small, cement-smelling room. In the morning the three of us met again at the same café and when it came time to catch the Athens train Martha again requested she be allowed to tag along.

            ‘I’m kinda more curious than lonesome now,’ she said.

            ‘There’s ground to cover,’ Henry welcomed her along, and in Martha I recognized, we had a Henry Luck project in view.  From it I would gain an insight into the purity of his altruism.

 

 

 

Laksmi Pamuntjak: Letters From Buru

Laksmi Pamuntjak is the author of two poetry collections, Ellipsis (one of The Herald UK’s Books of the Year 2005) and The Anagram; a treatise on violence and mythology entitled Perang, Langit dan Dua Perempuan (War, Heaven, and Two Women), and a collection of short stories, The Diary of R.S.: Musings on Art. Pamuntjak also translated and edited Goenawan Mohamad: Selected Poems and Goenawan Mohamad’s book of aphorisms under the title On God and Other Unfinished Things. She is also the co-founder of Aksara, a bilingual bookstore in Jakarta. Pamuntjak is currently at work on her first novel, The Blue Widow, about the historical memory of 1965. She has also recently been appointed a jury member of the Amsterdam-based Prince Claus Awards Committee.

 

Letters from Buru

 

— Dec. 1973                   

            Today I think of you like this star in the sky. Something that twinkles and fades, but always appears at the point of forgetting.

            I imagine you this weeping, pearly blue.

 

31 December 1973

Dearest—

            The year is drawing to a close and I am, again, cushioned at the base of some tree, watching yet another ketoprak. The others are spread out, huddled in their own unprepossessing bunches. Extension cords from the giant speakers not far from where I am sitting snake through the grass all the way to the stage; wow, aren’t we using a lot of electricity today.

            There is a gay feeling in the air. The place is suddenly an oasis of brilliant moonlit optimism suspended in a haze of laissez fare and we do not recognize ourselves. The sky is a canvas on which greedy gods are doodling. It may even be chilly but we are numbed to reality.

            As I told you earlier, it’s been a rather compassionate year. There can be as many as two, sometimes three shows a year, and the repertoire ranges from shamelessly banal to determinedly different. But most of the time these ketopraks are quite tedious.

            Most of the actors and musicians of tonight’s show came from Unit XIV Bantalareja. They’re a vain lot, I must add, always psyched up about themselves. They boast as many as half a dozen groups with a decidedly old Jakarta bent, one for lenong, one for orkes keroncong, one for irama Melayu—Bantala this, Bantala that, Bantala what’s-it. The motor is a group of Tangerang youth with a certain amount of bile about them, and a certain veiled disdain for the genteel sensibilities of the shadow puppet theatre, the wayang, so they can always be counted on for political fervour. They do stick to lifting only popular stories from Javanese history books, as they do now, but they really are not very imaginative. Short of ideological freedom, most of the stories are chosen for their anti-feudalism. It’s all about heroes and patriots. Great, mind-numbing stuff.

            (Being the unit closest to Namlea, these Bantalareja guys also get to look forward most to the giggling coastal girls.)

           Of course like all folk performances, the stories behind the screen are much more delicious, and for a few days during rehearsals fresh love was declared, new acts and allegiances were made, old friendships were broken. There is a sense of deepened reality to the air, precisely because laughter suspends disbelief. Such is the narcotic effect of art. But by tomorrow, all will be depleted and everybody will be slightly depressed.  

Bhisma

 

February-March, 1974

            It’s been a while since I’ve given food a thought. Every so often there will be “patients” coming to me with some minor grievance concerning the things they’ve eaten.

            Most prisoners on rice field duty look forward to getting their extra protein from catching the orong-orong that comes out and floats haplessly in water after they crush the soil in it. There are kelabangs too, a kind of crab-like spider, and of course, the easiest of all—lizards. The kelabang releases a bluish substance when it comes in contact with fire so often this gives those who consume it the most debilitating case of the runs. One has to admire their valor: we’re as hardy as they come, they always say, don’t know what plagues us this time. Still. Some have managed to get so sick they need to be transferred to the hospital in Namlea, the port city of Buru.

            Today a man was brought before me who had recently sought medication for kelabang poisoning. Only this time he was barely a man: it was clear that he’d been knocked about unconscious, with two stab wounds on his abdomen. I asked the people who’d brought him in what happened. They said he’d had diarrhea so severe that he had to—just absolutely had to—empty his bowels into the Wai Bini. Now there is an express rule in the penal colony that no one should empty their bowels into the river, because we rely on it for clean water. It is our only source.

            So of course they beat him up. And I feel awful, because he had sought treatment from me, and yet he had obviously mistrusted it (or me) not to have taken the tablets I’d given him.

Bhisma

 

—-, 1974

            It just dawned upon me, darling. About waiting, I mean. When we talk about waiting, we do not talk about a few hours, days, even months. It’s about reaching a point where you occasionally dare to wait, such as when you pick up a pen and a sheet of paper, see the first smile of a recovering patient, or meet a visitor who tells you “It’s still better to have a home than no home at all.”

           There is this man from Banten I visit from time to time. He believes I have a special power. When he first tried to point me to the fact, I dismissed him immediately. Don’t want to hear it, I said. I bet it’s something about my name. And if it is, then I already know about it. Don’t need a sage from black magic land to tell me that I will only die when I choose to. That yours, my love, will be the last face I see. But gradually I see what he means. There have been too many moments in which we as a collective would be beaten senseless for the error of another yet I have slowly come to realise that when it happens I do not feel any pain.

            I don’t feel it during interrogation either, which is really a mere excuse for torture. They say physical pain always mimes death, and each time pain is inflicted upon the body, it is a kind of mock execution. I try to conjure these things in my mind almost to elicit the tonal sensation of pain, if there is indeed such a thing, but I can’t. I can see what it does to my body, the gashes, the long, angry streaks, the swollen pus, and I can see what it is all about, the power game, the naked show of brute force. But I can’t summon the feeling.  

            It is an idle hour, and I have acquired it through sly machinations. Darkness now.

            My love. I have to take leave of you once more. 

Bhisma

 

—, 1974

Amba,

            I’ve learned to love the ocean because unlike the mountains I rarely see it. I often think of boating out instead of being boated in. I imagine the tremendous reefs under the water, the anemones my blind friends tell me are glued on them like jeweled mouths. Colour and poison they say are two sides of the same coin.

            Imagine, then: An island this precariously small, and yet one that refuses to be leveled down by anything – not even by the sweeping blue and fickle waves.

            You learn so much from people who in different parts of their lives have agreed to live on the coast. The three villages nearest to us are full of them. They are Butonese, and therefore not from around here, but they are happiest at sea. Every day they say to themselves tomorrow we might live another day. They feel the slightest threat in the sky, detect the ocean’s panic. Yet they sleep noiselessly and rise early as though to race dawn to another beginning. I’d like to take you with me to live by the ocean, if only to remind me of this thought where happiness knows itself.

Bhisma

 

(excerpts from the manuscript The Blue Widow: A Novel)

 

Sam Rutter: Box Hill

Samuel Rutter is an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne. He lives in Brunswick West and has an ardent passion for all things Latin American.

 

 

 

 

 

Box Hill

The beer was sitting uneasily in my stomach. Carl had the window of the taxi down as far as it would go, letting the air hit him full in the face. We rounded the corner and made it halfway up Whitehorse Road before the meter ticked over and we had to tell the cab driver that this was as far as we could afford. He pulled over almost immediately and rounded up the figure, the doors still locked as Carl handed him some notes and I left sweaty coins on the dashboard. He could count it if he liked, it was all there. I thanked the driver, without thinking why, and Carl was already on the footpath heading towards a service station in the distance when I slammed the taxi door shut.
            Carl always got this way when he came back from his trips: impatient, brooding, nocturnal. I caught up to him and put my arm around his shoulder. His steps were surer than mine, although it was my neighbourhood. I had drunk too much beer.
            Every time one of us came back we’d do the same thing. With the passing of the years, it was something we held on to as old school mates. We’d meet somewhere near Melbourne Central then head to a nearby bar where we’d drink beers by the jug until someone got hungry. So then we would set off for Chinatown looking for the same cheap restaurant we’d eaten at last time. We never found it, but quickly settled on one that might have been it or looked just as disreputable. There we’d eat three course banquets and wash them down with watery Asian lagers recommended by the waitresses. As the years went on, these nights began to end earlier and earlier; some had work the next day that now mattered to them. Work never mattered much to me, and even less to Carl. He didn’t have a job anyway; he was just back from South America.
            As I shifted my weight from my feet to his shoulders, I told him how the others were turning into suits, how they now had office jokes and not much else to say. How they had changed, or maybe how they hadn’t changed but had stopped pretending to be something they weren’t. Carl agreed with me, and told me that I hadn’t changed, that I was doing different things but I was still the same. Even when things are different they’re the same I told him.
            We were now past the church with signs covered in Korean writing and walking in the lights of the service station. We didn’t have to watch for traffic or lone trams rolling into the terminus as we crossed the road. It was past four in the morning and there are no cars, not even taxis, at that hour on a Monday in Box Hill.
            I told Carl we should walk up through the mall as I wanted to go to the ATM on our way through. The mall joins the old Whitehorse Plaza with Box Hill Central, the bigger shopping centre set above the train station. Both of them are part of a chain of shopping centres that nearly went under last year. They are now joined as one, Whitehorse Plaza has been completely refurbished and is no longer the dark old cavern it used to be. I was too young to remember it first-hand but I got lost once in the supermarket there when I was about three. It was the lady from two houses down who found me and had them put an announcement over the loudspeaker for Dad to come to the service desk. Her name is Margaret, she used to be a nun and she still lives two houses down but I used to call her the Bird Lady, for the huge aviary of quails, finches and budgies along the back fence of her garden. To reach the bank, we passed through a neatly paved area where they had torn down a wooden gazebo overgrown with wisteria. They tore it down because men and women in tracksuit tops, jeans and runners used to drink there well before noon and smoke rollies in front of their children.
            Carl hung back by the glass doors as I pulled cash from the metal slot in the wall. I’d lost the habit of using a wallet along with my actual wallet when travelling through Europe, so I just stuffed the two plastic notes into my pocket along with the bankcard, driver’s license and train ticket. My other pocket was reserved for a single house key and my mobile phone.
            We walked by the TAB, with its tattered receipts and betting forms littering the pavement outside its locked doors, and Carl still wasn’t talking. I wasn’t feeling much better than in the taxi but I was no longer stumbling, the walk and the air putting an end to the spinning. It’s those dodgy restaurants every time it’s the same I told Carl and he said I ought to be used to it after twenty-one years and no wonder I hated the Chinese food in Europe, it just didn’t have that taste of home and that I must be the only white guy still living in Box Hill. I told him I was born here before it changed and he asked me if I could even remember that, if that even meant anything and so I told him if he didn’t like my neighbourhood he could fuck off back to the dead centre where he came from. And that must have hit on something he’d been sitting on for a very long time because he began to talk then and he spoke uninterrupted for what seemed like an hour, probably because I was drunk, but he spoke and I listened.
            He said it’s not a question of like or dislike because you take your home with you whether you like it or not. He told me he’d left the desert behind years ago but that he still found the desert everywhere he went. Even when things are different they’re the same he told me. And then he told me about the ants. He said that in the desert, the sand is red, but red like it is nowhere else in the world. Out there in the day, he told me, it looks like there is nothing alive because there’s no vegetation and the wind leaves the sand rippled like a rusted sheet of corrugated iron. But there are ants out there, he said, not little black ants like the ones down here but ants as big as your thumb, and they live in this heat and build anthills as tall as a child. So all day these ants go about their business, using their six feet to move quickly over the scorching surface in a single file, working together. But at dusk this desert turns into an icy tundra and the ants have to retreat underground, where the heat stays trapped and doesn’t seep back up to the stars. The ants march back, he told me, they march back in single file, and one by one they climb up the mound and then down into the hole, down into the warm earth where they’re safe from the cold. This column of ants heads down, all except the last one, the last ant in the single file. That’s because this ant gathers together a clod of sand and pushes it up the anthill, stopping the opening with it so the cold can’t make its way into the nest. This one ant stays behind and stops up the opening and doesn’t go down into the warmth with the rest of the ants. It finishes its task and then does nothing. It sits there in the growing dark, waiting for the cold of the desert night to kill it.
            All this time we kept walking, past the chemists where the signs were no longer in English and Italian but English and Mandarin, or English and Vietnamese, or Mandarin and Vietnamese, and past the stationery and gift shops and internet cafés, past the two dollar shops and the restaurants. The restaurants weren’t too different from the ones we went to in Chinatown, but at this time of the morning they weren’t lit up and didn’t smell of ginger or ginseng or shallots but like burnt oil and spoilt wantons. In the windows of the Yum Cha dens the metal hooks hung empty; only hours ago sides of pig and chicken feet and whole ducks dangled from them, glazed and crisp with the fat forming congealed stalactites threatening to fall as the night wore on. They would all have been full. Carl sucked on a cigarette.
            We crossed the road, walked down Station Street and into Harrow Street, coming up against the huge, concrete Centrelink building. I started to tell Carl about Baudelaire and the swan but it didn’t come out right because I started to feel like I needed to vomit and next to Centrelink is the cracked white weatherboard house, which now has its window frames painted bright blue and I told Carl that’s where Mum lived for a while after she left and Carl nodded.
            We weren’t a hundred metres from my house now; we were turning into my street. I was tired, my feet ached and my guts churned again. I was tired, but I wasn’t thinking about my house or my neighbours, the Hong Kong family whose grandma still called me Boy after all these years. I was thinking about what Carl had said. I pushed the key into the lock and we echoed through the hallway, collapsing finally into the couches. I knew Carl was tired too, but I also knew he wouldn’t sleep. He’d lie on the couch for a couple of hours perhaps, drink plenty of water. But as day broke, before the house stirred, he’d go, leaving the front door ajar to spare the clash of wood on wood.
 

Rumjhum Biswas

Rumjhum Biswas’s prose and poetry have been published in India and abroad, both in print and online, including Per Contra, South, Words-Myth, Everyday Fiction, Danse Macabre, Muse India, Kritya, Pratilipi, Eclectica, Nth Position, The King’s English,  Arabesques Review, A Little Poetry, The Little Magazine, Etchings and Going Down Swinging. Her poem “Cleavage” was in the long list of the Bridport Poetry Competition 2006. Her story "Ahalya’s Valhalla" was among the notable stories of 2007 in Story South’s Million Writers’ Award.

 

 

 

 

Ducklings

 

 

“Shiuli!” called Nityananda as he peered into the dark. The pre-dawn air was chilly even though winter was months away. Nityananda hunched his shoulders and tried to draw the threadbare shawl tighter around him. Shivering as he rubbed his elbows in an effort to increase the circulation, Nityananda wondered how many more seasons his old bones would take. He prayed God would let him live long enough to see Shiuli married and Laltu and Poltu settled.  “Shiuli! O Shiuli!”  But the girl was nowhere to be seen. She must have gone to the pond. Nityananda had half a mind to go there and drag Shiuli back. It would be heartless, no doubt, but the girl had better learn early how hard their lot was.

Shiuli was eighteen and under happier circumstances would have been married already, with a child or two to show for it. But the double tragedy of losing both parents to Cholera one after the other in a span of just four weeks had turned Shiuli into a surrogate mother for her two younger brothers from the tender age of twelve. The boys, twins, were four years old at that time. Shuili’s three other siblings had also perished in the epidemic that swept their whole district, mowing down village after village. It was a miracle that three of his grandchildren managed to survive. Nityananda knew he was lucky. God had been merciful and spared a portion of his family when he could have taken them all in one fell swoop. Still Nityananda rued his fate. He wished that he had died instead of his son and daughter-in-law. God’s mercy was cruel. Or else why would able-bodied young people like Nityananda’s daughter-in-law and son die instead of an old man like him? Why would they, who were barely able to eke a living from the few animals and the little land that they owned, be assaulted by this sudden new scourge of such epidemic proportions? Why God why?

Shiuli had wanted to study. From the time she could hold a slate and chalk, she had followed her grandfather about repeating the letters of the alphabet and writing them down after Nityananda had scratched them out on the dry soil, frowning and wrinkling up her snub nose to see the letters better. Shiuli never let go until she had fully grasped Nityananda’s lesson for the day. The girl was smart. By the time she was seven Shiuli could add or subtract a whole bunch of numbers in her head and write full sentences. Haripada, Shiuli’s father used to be so proud of his clever daughter. Being the youngest child – the twins had not yet been born then – she was easily his favorite.

“Shiuli will be a teacher,” Haripada would say, picking up Shiuli and swinging her above his broad shoulders. “Every time our Shiuli walks past adjusting her spectacles and brandishing her ruler, everybody in the village will say, ‘Namoshkar Mashtarni Didimoni, namoshkar!”

Shiuli would giggle delightedly. Then, Nityananda would pipe in with a twinkle in his eyes, “But our Mashtarni Didimoni will say namoshkar to me, with folded hands every time she leaves for school, because I was her first teacher!” And Shiuli would promptly swing towards her dadu, her darling grandfather, from her father’s perch and grab his arms.

Yes, they use to have many dreams about Shiuli, dreams that were as sweet as the jasmine that scented their garden in summer. They would lie down under the stars and talk about Shiuli’s future even though Madhobi, Nityananda’s daughter-in-law, grumbled under her breath that the rightful place for girls was in her husband’s house and Shiuli was better off learning to cook and clean instead of getting her head full of frivolous ideas. Shiuli’s mother had her reasons. Neighbors often passed snide remarks about Haripada’s and Nityananda’s dreams. Besides, girl children were normally never allowed to finish school in the village. It was not the custom. At the most they studied up to class five or six. The village elders disapproved of so much attention paid to girls. They frowned upon girls gallivanting around after puberty. The earlier you married off a girl the better it was; there were few troubles and the groom’s family was usually willing to settle for less dowry, because the girls were fresh and tender. Nityananda himself had brought Madhobi home when she was barely fourteen and practically illiterate, but well versed in household duties and an expert cook. Madhobi was only twenty eight when, already weakened by multiple pregnancies and miscarriages, she succumbed to the Cholera epidemic when it hit their village. Haripada did not get a chance to mourn his wife for long. He followed some weeks later, after watching three of his children writhe in pain and die, one after the other.

Nityananda wiped the tears that pricked the corners of his rheumy eyes and trickled down. He went in to wake up the boys. Laltu and Poltu helped him feed their cow and the two goats. Meanwhile Shiuli fed the chickens and ducks. They had their breakfast of tea soaked with puffed rice only after all their animals and birds were fed. This was the first thing they did each morning, and it had been their routine ever since the rest of their family had died. The children had insisted on it; they could never bear to eat until all their four legged and winged family members had had their fill.  The three children’s world revolved around these mute creatures that demanded their love and gave back in full measure with their nuzzling and cooing and clucking, following them about whenever Nityananda and his grandchildren were nearby. Shiuli always chattered with the chickens and ducks as if they were her own babies. She also chattered with the cow and the goats. But ever since the ducklings had hatched, all three children had become unnecessarily attached to them.

Not becoming unnecessarily attached to their livestock was something that Nityananda, being a life hardened and practical man believed in staunchly. His own behavior towards their livestock was gruff, not that it made much of a difference as far as the animals were concerned. They still went up to him and followed him when he was near them. Nityananda scolded them as he stroked the larger animals or threw a handful of puffed rice at the chickens and ducks. Nityananda knew that attachment created problems. Like that time when he had to sell the year old pie-bald male kid to the butcher and Laltu and Poltu had cried for days. Shiuli had consoled them and given him black looks side by side. She would never know how bad Nityananda had felt that day; as if he had sold his own grandson. But he had had to do it. What choice did he have? There was the loan to be repaid and taxes too. Someday, when they were grown up, they would understand.

Nityananda crossed the narrow four poster bed sized bit of courtyard that separated his room from that of the boys. He bent his head to avoid the strands of thatch hanging over the low doorway. He didn’t like to wake the boys up so early. They were so young; if they didn’t play and read and have fun now when would they ever? Time flows like a river and never stops for even a moment, thought Nityananda to himself. Soon the boys would be lost to manhood. The pleasures of running down a field or splashing in the water would be lost to them. The magic of a new world unfolding day by day would be gone forever. But what could he do?

Laltu and Poltu went to the free government primary school. Before they left for school in the morning, they helped Nityananda with the cow and the goats. Together they untied the animals and led them out down the village road. Once they reached a customer’s house, either Laltu or Poltu called out while Nityananda sat down on his haunches to milk the cow. The boys were quite adept at milking the goats, but Nityananda still preferred to do the cow himself. There was time enough for his grandsons. He measured and poured the milk from the pail into the vessel that his customer handed over. Laltu collected the money or wrote the amount and date in a notebook kept especially for those who preferred to pay at the month end. After that they moved on to the next house and then to the next, until all their customers were served. This was a slow and sometimes tedious process. It would have been better for Nityananda’s old bones if the boys’ took the milk to their customers later on in the day. Raw milk didn’t go bad if you kept strips of straw in the cans. It stayed good for atleast an hour or two. But people liked to buy milk that they could watch being milked straight from the cows. So Laltu and Poltu had to be woken up at the crack of dawn, even during holidays. Today however, they seemed to have got up on their own. Nityananda rubbed his eyes and looked again. The grass mats that served as their beds were empty.

“Shiuli! O Shiuli! Laltu! Poltu! Where are you?”

No one answered.

Suddenly feeling alarmed, Nityananda hurried out. He looked to the right and left and then went down to the pond. In the brightening morning light, though still misty, he was able to make out shadowy shapes huddled near the pond steps. He called again. The shapes remained still. A broken sob caught his ears. Nityananda ran towards the sound.

He found them sitting there, hugging the ducklings. This time it was Shiuli who was crying her heart out. Laltu and Poltu were crying too and trying to comfort her at the same time. Shiuli, bent over with grief, sat holding the ducklings to her bosom which would have held babies had their circumstances been different. Shiuli, weeping her heart out as if she was going to lose her own children to sickness. Shiuli, who no longer ran up numbers inside her head or read fluently from the day old newspaper that Nityananda sometimes brought home from the village school master’s house. Shiuli, who had grown day by day into an exact replica of her mother, and turned into a quiet dutiful woman, a good cook and a devoted home-maker.

Nityananda felt his heart cracking up under the weight of sorrow. His eyes stung, but the tears remained inside. He wished he could weep like these children. Hold the half grown ducklings to his bosom; shower them with kisses. But what was the use of getting emotional? This wretched bird flu had hit every village for miles around. The men in white suits would be coming over to claim the little ones, any day now. Any day.

 

Cassandra L Atherton: Neck

Cassandra Atherton is a Melbourne writer and critic.  She lectures in
Creative Writing and Romanticism at The University of Melbourne.  Her book of poetry, After Lolita, was published earlier this year by Ahadada Press and her first novel, The Man Jar, was published in September by Printed Matter Press.  Her short stories and poems have been published in Australian and international journals.  She is currently working on a book, Wise Guys, examining the role and responsibility of the American public intellectual, after interviewing Noam Chomsky, Harold Bloom, Camille Paglia, Stephen Greenblatt and many more.  She is writing her second novel, Cherry Bomb, set in Japan after receiving a fellowship to study the floating world.

 

Neck

She always wore her hair in a chignon. It was one of the first things he noticed about her. Silver-blonde hair swept back with a diamante barrette, always in aqua. He never saw her face then, as he was always running late and entering at the back of the lecture theatre, always sitting behind her. It was the back of her neck that got him through all those Psychology lectures. He began to time the lectures, searching for a pattern. His notebook was filled with useless words, nonsense figures and in the margins were endless sketches of her neck. Once, when he thought he was ready, she wore a strapless dress. He left in disgust.

He watched her strawberry birthmark watch him. Tiny and bulbous, it hid amongst the pale hairs to the right of her neck, a smooth crimson circle. He began taking a red pen into the lectures with him, perfecting the birthmark, positioning it over and over in his folder. Once he even stabbed his finger and let the bright red bead drip onto the page. He smiled, looking at the back of her neck, it was the closest he’d come, but when he shut the folder it smudged.

A guest lecturer was scheduled to speak on visual perception. He opened his notebook and began to think. At lunchtime he bought sixteen backpacks and placed them on a combination of seats in the last six rows. He entered late and searched for the back of her neck. Second last row three seats in from the end. Perfect. He sat behind her in the back row and unzipped his bag. He placed it on the seat next to him and tucked his heavy coat around it. Staring at the back of her neck, he waited. A young woman entered half way through the lecture and tried to sit in the back row. He coughed, a hacking cough he saved for special occasions and sniffed loudly until she moved to the third row. As the lecturer pressed the Play button, he reached for the camera nestling in his overcoat. As the lecturer apologised and pressed the button for the second time, his hand trembled with anticipation. And as the lecturer ducked behind the podium, he aimed at the back of her neck, clicking the shutter as the theatre lights dimmed and the video began. Perfect, he smiled. “Perfect,” said the lecturer from behind the podium.

He hid it in his bag and smuggled it out of the lecture theatre. It throbbed in the darkness beneath the zipper. He kept his eyes downcast, running a sweaty palm through his black hair. She was just ahead of him as he shuffled down the steps. He could hear the staccato beat of her stilettos on the concrete. He drew his coat around him. He started to sweat. Tiny beads of salt water clung to his forehead while he thought of the bright bead on the back of her neck. Two thousand six hundred and forty two more steps and he would be at his car parked in Bouverie Street. She would turn the corner in another one hundred and twenty-four steps at the Baillieu to research her thesis on states of consciousness. Once he sat behind her at a desk in the stacks. He filled four sketchbooks and used two number four Derwents replicating the fine silver hairs creeping down her neck. Bouverie Street. He thought of Emma Bovary. She would have had a fantastic neck. He coaxed the car into action, the bag sat on the passenger seat, its strap looped over the handbrake. He patted it softly, stroking the small hard cylinder in the centre, imagining the image coiled inside. Not too much longer. He locked and unlocked the door six times, each turn of the key in the lock calming him with its familiar rhythm. The loud clicking noises brought Cat to the door. She wound herself in between his legs, shedding her fine silver coat on his trouser cuffs. Her saucer was empty so he poured her some strawberry milk from the carton and reached for his brown mug on the top shelf. It didn’t seem so long ago that his sister had given it to him. A twenty-first present. She made it in pottery, painting his name in a big blue flourish on the side. He traced the letters with his finger as Cat lapped up the milk. The curly capital S was his favourite. Simon. There was a blue ink spot in the shape of a butterfly for a full stop. He pictured it on a large polished wood desk. A couch in the corner. He poured a combination of lemonade and orange juice into his mug and headed for the darkroom. Cat curled into a contented ball on the cushion. He entered his darkroom and sat stiffly on the wooden stool. He took the roll of film out of his bag, stroking the cylinder with his thumb. He looked up at the thousands of sketches of her neck and mentally decided where he would hang the photograph. He pictured it on the wall in his bedroom, the small half-crescent table adorned with mango-scented candles and lilies floating in bowls of peach-coloured water. The gentle flame of the candle would reflect teardrops of gold onto her lily neck. He looked down at the roll of film pressing it to his lips. For the first time he began to wonder what her name was.

    

                                    *                      *                      *

 

Black and white photograph. Shiny. Tempting. Glistening. Now he could kiss the back of her neck. He teased her tiny mole with his tongue, until a moist mist clung to the glass of the picture frame, obscuring his view. He nuzzled the delicious down at the base of her neck, imagining green apple shampoo foam gliding slowly down her neck. He pictured the crystal beads of water leaping from the shower rose. He shivered, thinking about how that neck would taste, wet. He hung the picture frame on the wall, watching the gentle flame of the mango candle lick at her graceful neck. Cat licked his bare ankle, a raw, rough demand for food. He reached into his pocket for some Go-Cat and sprinkled the tiny biscuits on the carpet. They rained down on Cat’s head, a shower of smoky bacon biscuits. He licked his fingers and picked up his lecture pad from the bedside table. Reddish-brown biscuit crumbs glued themselves to the cracks in his bottom lip. He switched off the lamp, tugging at its long white cord with his toes, urging the plug out of the wall. Cat crunched on her last two treats. He shook his black backpack, making sure his keys were safely tucked in the front pocket, smiling when he heard their familiar jingle. He carefully walked to the kitchen on his tiptoes, twenty-six steps without lowering his heels to the cream carpet. He placed one totally smooth and unbruised Royal Gala apple into a brown paper bag, two Coco Pop Breakfast Bars and a flask of apricot nectar in the back pocket of his backpack. Thirty-two steps to the front door.

He locked the door, checking the door handle six times to make sure it was locked. The cold, hard metal bit into the flesh between his thumb and first finger as he tried the door one last time, his moist palm fogging up the shiny silver of the handle. With the edge of his coat he wiped the moist droplets away, creating a series of sweaty streaks. Cat pawed the left window as he got into his small orange car and drove away.

He drove feverishly, his hot hands sliding around the steering wheel. He turned into Bouverie Street. His car park was empty. He sighed and smiled, pulling into the familiar space. The street was deserted except for the metallic blue Honda Civic down near the pub. He got out and checked the meter. His watch beeped once. Four thirty. Perfect timing. It was a “use twenty cents only” parking meter. He liked this meter much more than all the others. It was clean and none of the stickers were peeling off. With the twenty- cent meter he could always be sure that he was not being ripped off. Too often people slipped a dollar or two dollar coin into the slot of a more recent machine and never used the full four hours. It was such a waste. He rattled the small cylinder in his pocket. He carried his twenty-cent pieces in there now. He even made a label for it with his calligraphy pen. The sweeping number two figure looked much like her neck. The zero, he imagined was the back of her head. If you looked closely you could see the tiny strawberry birthmark he perfectly placed on each figure. He got back into the car. You didn’t have to pay for the meter until eight o’clock. His lecture was at half past one. Only nine more hours.

  

                                    *                      *                      *

 

She was running late. Very late. It was so unlike her to be late, but he supposed she had a reason to be. She climbed the back steps to the door of the lecture theatre. She unclipped her diamante barrette, smoothed back her hair and reclipped it into place. She pushed open the door and slipped into the nearest empty seat. The envelope was still in her hand. The corners were damp and rounded. “We regret to inform you.” Regret, she thought, “No, non je ne regrette rien.” Edith Piaf. Coffee. The two were inseparable. She decided that if she ever became rich enough she’d set up a scholarship for students who had been screwed by the system. She smiled the first smile for two days. He was wriggling in the seat next to her, bumping into her armrest, causing a mini commotion as he began snapping shut his four lecture pads and a tin of Derwent pencils. People turned around and shushed him. The lecturer glared fiercely. “It’s O.K,” she whispered, “just sit down and you can sneak out in a minute.”

He picked up his books and ran. The back door slammed shut behind him. She sighed and tucked the letter into her breast pocket. One yellow lecture pad lay open on the patterned carpet.

She thought they were just squiggles at first. A bored person’s doodles. Hieroglyphics. Walk Like An Egyptian. She could still remember that dance from high school. She would still argue that Manic Monday was better. The Bangles. Bracelets. She wondered if she’d ever be able to afford a chunky gold bracelet with a padlock. “Not this year,” she though, thinking about the letter. It was only when she picked up the notepad that she realised that the squiggles were actually female necks. Women’s napes or rather one nape repeated over and over. She flicked through the book. No writing, just thousands of squiggly necks. It was not until late that night, just before she was about to switch off her lamp that she realised it was her neck. Her nape. Her strawberry birthmark.

 

                                   *                      *                      *

 

She returned his lecture pad. He wouldn’t look at her. She figured he was just embarrassed. “You’ll have to find another model,” she told him, “I’m completing my Masters in Tasmania. Leaving next Monday.” Manic Monday, she thought. He looked pale. Black hair, black coat, and black bag. So pale.

“Sorry.” She wondered why she was apologising.

“I missed out on a scholarship by point one of a mark.” She wondered why she was telling him this.

“I’ve got family there, you know. Won’t be so bad.” He still didn’t look up.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

   

                                    *                      *                      *

 

He was a lunatic. He had to be. A total fruit loop. Nut bar. It was taped to the back of the chair in front of her:

Sorscha,
Marry me (with your hair up, of course). 
Model for me. 
I will make you happy.
Simon.

 
She looked at the letter. She looked at her plane ticket. Why not? What could be worse than Tasmania?

   

                                    *                      *                      *

 

He bought her a garnet wedding band. A tiny round stone. Bulbous. Crimson. She didn’t wear a veil. He stood slightly behind her when they said their vows. Vowing to love, honour and cherish her neck. She thought about having a baby.

 

                                    *                      *                      *

 

She cooed when he stroked her neck. Lying quietly on her stomach while her daddy, perched on the edge of a chair, sketched her for hours. “Perfect, perfect,” Simon muttered to himself. Her baby with the perfect neck. Simon called her Lily.

Darkness with long, cold fingers woke her. An empty bed. Unslept in. Unwrinkled. She thought about the box under the bed. Filled with notes, papers, books, life. Her unfinished Masters. Her letter from Tasmania. Confetti from her wedding. Simon’s mug was gone from the bedside table. His red slippers conspicuously absent. She could have worn her hair down tonight. A butterfly clip munched on her scalp. She loosened its claws and climbed out of bed.

Her bedroom door was ajar. Pink carpet. Pink walls. Pink Strawberry Shortcake quilt cover. Lilies. Six lilies in a crystal vase. Always six. From Simon. Her cot was empty, but the wooden bars were still in place. She pushed open the door and turned on the light as Simon traced a long, flat petal down her neck and along her spine. Lily took out her dummy and kissed him on the mouth. Repeatedly. Huddled in the damp corner. Sharing a secret.

 

                                   *                      *                      *

 

The pills were half pink and half white. Like gingham. She pulled them apart like she had seen so many times in the movies. The Bad Seed. She poured the powder into her red cordial and stirred it with her finger. She searched under the bed for the blue photo album. It was sandwiched between the brown box and the wedding album. She flicked to the second page, tracing the photo through the plastic. The first photograph he had taken of her neck. She pulled back the plastic sheet, tearing the fragile photo from its sticky bed. Lily drank the cordial. She tucked her into her bed for the last time and then started the car. It was a long drive. The sea was a murky turquoise. Her last thought was of Simon’s manicured nails tracing the velvet nape of Lily’s cold, stiff neck.