January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Brian Park was born and raised in New Jersey and graduated from Rutgers University with a bachelor’s in English Literature. After graduation, he moved to Seoul, South Korea where he currently resides. He has travelled throughout much of the last few years, which is the basis for the stories he has written.
The Return of Jack and Johnny
Serena and I parted over a cup of Lao coffee. She was going to stay in Pakse and I was going to get on a bus to Stung Treng, Cambodia. My trip was nearly at an end. I only had five days left.
We sat there talking about Lao coffee, about the plateaus where it came from, the high and misty jungle villages she would soon be visiting, and found ourselves staring at the grounds at the bottom of the mug with nothing else to say. I told her she would have a great time in Pakse and she wished me luck in Cambodia and a safe trip back to New York. I picked up my bag and hoisted it over my shoulder again. Here was our fork in the river, so we watched each other float away laughing. So goes another goodbye in the morning.
An hour later, I was riding in the back of a covered-truck driving towards the southern border of Laos and Cambodia through the flat plains and fields of yellow-green grasses. The back of the truck was lined with two benches on either side so we could ride facing each other or lean out to watch the countryside pass by. The women covered their heads and their faces with scarves so only their eyes were showing. The school-children sat silently, patiently waiting, speaking in secret conversations amongst each other, riding hours away from home for whatever reason, something in the city. At some rest-stops along the way, brief as they were, the sides of the truck would suddenly become filled with food and hands and down on the ground the eyes and faces of girls trying to sell the little bundles they had. I bought plenty of food to eat along the way. Sticky rice rolled in bamboo was essential. The chicken a godsend. The lychee branches a much needed touch.
And then sometime around noon, when the sun was high in the sky and burning its intense yellow light over the lush fields of green, the truck stopped and I was motioned to get out. I was one of the last ones left in the truck. Where the rest of them would go, I did not know. Where I was, I did not know. All I knew was this was where one ride would lead to another, and then another, until at the end of the day I would finally get there. I had done this all before. I knew the system well. There was a motorbike parked at this small crossroads in the middle of nowhere and that’s where I got on. I waved goodbye to the kids left in the covered-truck and then got on the back of the motorbike. We rode through the fields and then took a shortcut through an emerald green forest down one long dirt path in the middle of the woods. I was having flashbacks of falling but feeling peaceful for the trees surrounding me. And then we arrived at the border and the peace stopped. Here were the complications.
The guard sitting at the border was a rough intimidating character, a person who seemed like he hated his job. Perhaps he was angry over the little amount of power he had in the destiny of the world and had to compensate by controlling the destinies of those who came to his gate. I had come to the wrong gate, he told me. I had to get a visa at the other gate.
“How much is the visa?” I asked, even though I already knew, just to see if he would jerk me around.
“Twenty-five dollar,” he told me with that hard look on his face.
“How am I supposed to get there?”
“You figure out! There are driver over there,” he yelled and pointed. I felt my blood rising and struggled to suppress Jack Bauer. Nobody yells at Jack Bauer and lives to yell again…
“Ok, take it easy, Jesus Christ…” I muttered and walked towards where he was pointing.
The border consisted of the guard shack, the roughly built wooden office, and a small family-owned restaurant with a wooden overhang where currently five or six boys and girls sat quietly in the shade playing on the dirt floor; the two drivers, one with black sunglasses and the other with a blue-striped polo shirt, stood about laughing and talking with the motorbike guy who was apparently a friend of theirs. The fish had begun to fry.
“Hi, how are you doing?” I said amiably, concealing my suspicion. I could already see a three-pronged effort on the cooperation of these drivers to try and shake me of what precious bills I had left. I was down to my last hundred-dollar bill. Besides that, I had a handful of kip which would soon be obsolete. In Cambodia, the currency is riel, but like Laos, dollars talk the loudest. Prepare for the ugly surprise.
“Hello,” the one in the blue-striped shirt said. “Do you need a ride?”
“Uh, yes. Apparently, my driver,”I said nodding my head towards the dirty and deranged motorbike driver, now looking like an escaped mental-patient with his helmet off, “took me to the wrong border. So I need a ride to the visa office and then to Stung Treng.”
“Stung Treng,” blue-stripes guy repeated thoughtfully. “Stung Treng, maybe we will do for fifty dollar.”
“FIFTY DOLLAR?!” I shouted.
I hadn’t meant to lose my cool so early. My plan was to, with calm and Oscar-worthy hustle, ask their price and then pretend to lose interest saying, “I guess I’ll just walk there”, or “Eh, nothing to see in Cambodia anyway. Well, thanks anyway fellahs,” ever so casually walking away whistling a tune as they called after me asking me to name my own price. But the shock of his first price was so great, I nearly lost it. All I could think was, “Oh my god, what if it really is fifty dollars? I’m screwed!”
I quickly regained composure, the little boys and girls and the puppies and the soft yellow chicks now looking at me from the cool dirt floor. And then blue-stripes guy added,
“And you must pay the motorbike… (He conversed in Lao with the motorbike guy)… ten dollar.”
“PAY THE MOTORBIKE GUY??? TEN DOLLAR???”
They were quite curious about my reaction. “These foreigners sure do have quick tempers”, they must’ve been thinking…
I was pacing back and forth now, calling the only one I could rely on in a situation like this. It was time to resurrect J.C… Johnny Cochran!!!
“Now hold on, hold on, hold on just one minute. Let me get this straight gentlemen,” I said walking before the jury of children, puppies, and chicks, “let me make sure I’m clear. You’re telling me, the ride to the visa office is double the amount of the visa itself? Preposterous! And you,” I said, now addressing the motorbike guy, “it seems rather curious that you would take me to the wrong border, just where your two friends happen to be standing around waiting. Tell me sir, how long have you known these two gentlemen?”
Motorbike guy gave me a puzzled look and looked to blue-stripes guy for help.
“We work together for many year,” blue-stripes guy answered for him.
“Yes, I’m sure you have. Bringing people to the wrong gates and then SKYROCKETING THE PRICE! Gentlemen,” I said leaning in now, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’LL TELL YOU WHAT I’LL DO,” I said making a big show for the children, puppies, and chicks who now stared at me with wide-eyes,
“I’m going to forget the insult of that first asking price. I’m going to PAY THIS MAN,”I said loudly so all could hear and bear witness as I counted out wrinkled bills of kip into the bewildered motorbike guy’s ripped and dirty glove, “I’m going to PAY THIS MAN the amount that I feel HIS SERVICES earned him this day. Now let’s see, we rode on the dirt road for about thirty-minutes, at about fifty miles per hour… who’s good at math here?”
“Sir,” blue-stripes guy said stepping in, “that is not enough. Do you have dollar?”
“I don’t know… do you have a car?”
He looked at me with a puzzled expression.
“Alright, let’s end this. I don’t have all morning,” I said, even though I really did. “I’ll pay you fifteen dollars. That’s fifteen,” I said showing them the hundred-dollar bill (I didn’t have change), “good old greenback Americana. What do you say?”
“AND I’LL PAY THIS GUY,” I added motioning to the dirty and confused motorbike driver, “five bucks, which HE DIDN’T EARN, but just so we all go home happy? Ok?”
They talked amongst themselves for a minute. The children and puppies and baby-chicks looked at me with wide-staring eyes as I apologized to them silently for being such a jackass. “The world made me this way,” I mouthed silently to them, but they didn’t understand. Not yet anyway…
“It is too small,” blue-stripes guy said. “Not enough to even pay gas. Stung Treng many kilometer. Take two hour driving.”
“What? Hey, come on. I could drive on twenty dollars easily in America! Are you telling me—”
At that point, the-angry-guard-who-hated-his-destiny came up and began getting involved after hearing all of that yelling; deciding to take care of the small zone which Providence had left in his control.
“You must pay driver!” he yelled. “You come to wrong gate! You buy visa, then you go to Stung-Treng!”
“Stay out of this you goddamn deputy!” I snarled. Jack Bauer was beginning to rear his larynx-cracking head from beneath the muddy waters…
“WHAT?! I’LL KILL YOU!!!” the guard screamed and grabbed his machine-gun as I quickly dived to the ground and pulled the revolver out of my ankle-holster, squeezing off three shots before hitting the ground…
Just kidding. That’s not what happened.
What actually happened was the guard came over. We drank some tea and worked out our misunderstandings. And it turned out that I was right, he really was unhappy with his destiny. Who knew on that early afternoon on the border of Cambodia and Laos, two grown men would be crying in reconciliation…
“You have to be tough in this business, you know?” blubbered the angry guard, “Do you know how many pedophiles and child molesters and drug addicts come through those gates every day? You think I don’t want to smile? You think I like yelling? Every day, I wave these bastards into my country so they can corrupt and molest and destroy the innocence of my children, our children. I have to be tough! I have to be mean!”
“I’m so sorry,” I said sympathetically, “If only those sons-of-bitches in Washington… It’s just this war keeps dragging on and on… and that lying son-of-a-bitch Johnson!”
“Why do we do this to each other?” he asked with tears in his eyes. “Why do people always destroy the things they love?”
At about sunset, the ride to Stung Treng was complete. I paid sunglasses guy the $20 we agreed on even though I knew I was being ripped off. The motorbike-guy got $5. That meant I had $75 left for five days. Plenty of money for a short stay in Cambodia, as long as there were no more ugly surprises. But there were always ugly surprises. They grew everywhere like daisies concealing Africanized-bees hidden inside with itchy stingers on their asses. And I was trying to stop and smell as many flowers as I could before that plane ride back to winter in New Jersey…
Stung Treng is a small town built with wide-open streets and no traffic, dilapidated buildings that offered nothing. In the centre of town was a small street-market which sold bootleg clothing and other knick-knacks. There were small shops selling cigarettes and soap. Barrels filled with ethanol where motorbikes would stop to refuel their small gas-tanks. A few barbecue stands with no meat stood waiting along the sidewalk overlooking the blue Mekong River offering warm cans of beer and soda floating in coolers filled with water. As far as the good old distraction of commerce was concerned, that was about all that I could see happening in Stung Treng.
I was dropped-off in front of a guesthouse on a street near the city square and street-market. The guesthouse had an open entrance into a sort-of lobby with some books and computers that didn’t work, some tables with dusty homemade menus. It was an old rustic sort of building, the kind that didn’t instil much confidence or expectation, but instead simple resignation, a deep breath saying okay, how dirty is it going to be? Fortunately for me, the room wasn’t the dirtiest I had been in so far, though it was certainly the ugliest. The bed was a dingy thing with speckle-white sheets, a mirror on the headboard so I could I watch myself having sex with invisible hookers, rusty-brown stains of blood coagulation, the remnants of someone getting their head blown off while watching themselves having sex with invisible hookers. The only upside was the bathroom didn’t smell like evil piss. Be thankful for what you got.
Before I wandered town till night, I decided to sit down at one of the wooden tables outside with a view of the river and the people walking around, playing hacky-sack in the street, and otherwise sitting around gambling and smoking and talking, riding by slow. The menu was written in Chinese, English, and Khmer. I wasn’t that hungry and was more or less just ordering food and a beer for the activity of eating and drinking and smoking and watching the golden glowing twilight of the river and the sunset streets. What else was there to do?
As I sat and waited for my meal to come, I looked at the message board on the wall next to my table. It was mostly just flyers for other guesthouses in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. I took note of one for Siem Reap called something Gardens. I didn’t bother writing it down. I was sure I would have no problem finding it, as if there were no other guesthouses ending with something-Gardens…
And then as my eyes continued to roam, there was one flyer, which caught my eye, as it was clearly graphically-designed to do. It said,
“PROTECT OUR CHILDREN FROM SEX CRIMES!!! IF YOU SEE …” and featured a shadowy photograph of a grown man and a little girl… in any case, it was subtle and illustrative.
It was similar to the big sign I had seen at the border. The sign encouraging people to report pedophiles if they saw any. They’re everywhere in Cambodia. Everyone knows that. It was only months ago, platinum-selling British-pop has-been Gary Glitter was reported in these parts, a frequenter of the Indochinese region for the young pretty girls. They kicked him out. But many more less famous than he still roaming. Report suspicious activity… as if it was that easy…
But then as I rolled my tongue in a mouth full of skepticism, I glanced at a table on the other side of the room. They were the only other people at the tables at that time, four middle-aged white men sitting by themselves waiting for their food. I saw them when I sat down obviously, but now something inside me stirred. I began to look at them with a deep burning passion of justice in my eyes. I felt The Diplomat rising…
Four middle-aged white men in Cambodia? Just taking in the sights, eh? Cut the crap. You make me sick…
It was the pancakes that convinced me. When they received their food, I stayed watching (secretly) the skinny one methodically slice and chew his pancakes. Drizzling the pancake syrup in slow perfect lines like the commercials, his knife pressing against the soft dough in perfect symmetrical triangles. It’s well-known that pedophiles are neat-freaks and control-freaks. Abusive child-hood, often abused for being messy as children… they hate filth, they hate it! Love giving children baths, the fucking perverts…
I watched him eating his pancakes slowly, chewing robotically, his eyes focused with the flavor of the maple syrup, the fucking bastard. The rest of them carried on casually as if thinking nothing of the shameful wrongs they would commit against innocent children to fulfil their dark desires. Coming to this land because of its weakness for money, its desperation, and the renowned beauty of its children. I wanted to choke the pancakes out of that motherfucker until Aunt Jemima came and slapped me two times. And even then I wouldn’t stop…
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to say something. I couldn’t just let these sick-fucks come into this country and defile the innocence of children. I wanted to smash the plates on their table and feed them the shards, the bastards. So I stood up and said something.
“You guys think it’s fine? Eh? Dinner’s good? Enjoying your dinner, eh?” I said transforming into The Diplomat, rounding their table, fingering their plates, dipping my fingers in the syrup and tasting it crudely in their faces.
“How are you guys enjoying your stay, hmm? Everything is nice? These shitty bedrooms holding up for you? Watch yourself fuck any little boys and girls in that mirror yet? Not before dinner, eh? How nice,” I said my hands now on their shoulders.
“I’ll give you guys five seconds, to get the fuck—”
Before I could finish my ultimatum of a proper Diplomat delivered ass-whipping, their wives came into the guesthouse and looked at me curiously, probably thinking I was the waiter. The Diplomat was shot; he was crawling on the bathroom floor, a trail of blood as the urinals overflowed…
“And, I recommend the soup! It’s excellent!”
I left before my food arrived.
I couldn’t return to the guesthouse until nightfall. I had arranged for a bus to Phnom Penh and then Siem Reap early in the morning. As long as they weren’t on the same bus, I would be spared the humiliation and blubbering apology that would surely follow. I spent the rest of the evening down by the river. There were lots of people there, cleaning up for the day. There were chickens tied up together and clucking under woven baskets. Small silvery fish laid out on piled lines. On the blue river, where the sun was now setting, the entire sky became blue twilight, and the river an even brighter shade of blue despite the depth of the sky. In the water was a man washing his motorbike with love and care, making sure it was polished, bright, and clean so he could ride with pride through these defeated streets. And then there were some naked boys dancing in the water, their mother giving them their bath in the same waters as the motorbike, the waters that gave them the silvery fish, the same waters that gave this small town with nothing just a little bit of something, that something that they had always had, that something that they would still have when everything else is gone. The old man sings of rivers…
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Carolyn van Langenburg is the author of three books of literary fiction: The Teetotaller’s Wake, Fish Lips and Blue Moon, published by Indra press. Her collection of poems was published by Picaro in 2007. She has travelled widely in Asia and resides in the Blue Mountains with her husband.
Idea for a Story
Leaves dance in the air.
Dust whirls across the park.
A dog yelps at its tail. Boys run around anything and everything.
A woman’s hands disappear, her forearms disappear. A box draws her in, and then she pulls her arms out of the box and raises her hands high in the air. They dart like pale birds, flit and swoop into the box.
They dart like pale birds…
Paper plates smeared with chocolate icing and the grainy green slicks of tabouli spill out of park garbage bins. Flip flop with chewed chicken wings and an empty pvc bottle that takes off with the wind to have a go at the dog. The dog jumps at the bottle and grovels it as if it were a bone. The bottle, too big for its mouth, jerks and rolls and whizzes.
A woman’s legs walk under a box. Do the legs belong to the woman with the disappearing hands? The dog runs at the heels of the legs. The box bobs and jerks above a body. When the dog races back to the rolling bottle, the box with legs stops.
The head of the woman with the disappearing hands appears as the whole of the woman’s body bends to pick something up off the grass. She holds the retrieved thing high, pinched between thumb and forefinger, fingers furled into the palm of her hand…
No camera can see between the soft pads of her fingers furled over the top of her palm, which they touch. She stands still, holding up something small to examine, the box balanced against her hip. She may be reading a sign. She may be one of those women who look for signs to decipher, one who pinches salt to toss over her shoulder for good luck. Caught in this part of her life, she repeats her daily routine, juggling many banal tasks to keep food on the table and clothes on her child’s back. She may look for signs of future good fortune because money is tight. She worries, or does she, about her son’s performance at school, how much television he watches and how few books interest him. Is he a slow reader? How can the camera tell us anything about the life these two live? As it is, if a camera were to pan this action, it will record that a woman dressed for a picnic in a park carries a box. Her shirt, worn under a sweatshirt, is bright red and her jeans are faded around the knees. She looks dishevelled. What significance will the camera capture in its frame? What message will be decoded by the decipherers of the visual medium of this woman who loses her hands in a box filled with party food? How will they interpret her holding high something pinched between her thumb and forefinger? Is the message portending that, as she is a mother providing a happy birthday party for her son, she will be rewarded in the future with charming gummy grandchildren? Do those who spend their lives deciphering images drive the life out of motherhood, perching it on top of sentimental interpretation that diminishes humanity?
She is a woman providing a birthday party for her son. That’s all, in a snapshot.
The wind tears a feather from the tips of her fingers…
The wind pelts the bottle with stirred up city grit. The wind smacks twigs and empty crisp bags at the bottle. The wind whips the bottle with wrappers and ripped newsprint…
Boys yell and run, dog runs and barks, bottle rolls and whistles…
The woman hoists the box, her head disappears and she stumbles. The box wobbles where her head ought to be, flips open and flap-flaps…
Add a black sky and the drum roll of thunder with a few big drops of rain working up to a downpour and the scene is set.
In parenthesis
The woman stands at a picnic table in the park. The dog noses a pvc bottle rolling near her feet. Boys cluster at one end of the table, joking about bullshit and who is full of it. The woman’s hands disappear into a box then reappear. They are transformed into birds that rise in the air, swoop and land on the table before taking off again. Her hands plunge into the box again — her hands become other things like bowls and food containers, escaping her attention. Her inattentive eyes mirror the sky that they skim. Grey, they are, with a tree blackening in front of darkening grey…
Cake rises above box.
Candles under her chin burst into little flames. Boys cheer. They yell a song about a happy birthday to you. A red-faced boy blows out the little flames. The other boys congratulate him for being full of bullshit. Hands become knife, knife cuts cake, boys stuff triangles of cake in their mouths.
The dog’s mouth is never shut.
And so the story begins:
A woman packs bowls and paper plates and empty plastic food containers into a box. She pushes chewed chicken wings and plates streaked with tabouli and chocolate icing into the park garbage bin. The wind hurls the paper plates out of the garbage bin, tosses them to the ground, whips them across the grass where an empty pvc bottle rolls. The wind and the bottle tease the dog that jumps at the bottle and grovels it as if it were a bone. The wind whips at boys, pushing them backwards when they run forwards. The sky is blackening, the clouds rapidly broiling and thickening. Big raindrops fall and the yelping boys take off towards cars parked under big trees. The woman gathers up the box of birthday party things. When the dog barks and the boys shout, her head vanishes.
The park is suddenly dark.
Thunder drumrolls.
The woman stumbles through pouring rain to one of the parked cars. Her head pops up when the box drops and lands between her breasts and the side of one of the cars.
When the drenched woman sinks behind the steering wheel of her car, she looks into the rear vision mirror. The birthday boy, two of his friends and the dog sit in a row on the backseat, grins wet, panting hard.
Question stops story: Where does dog begin and boy end?
The next thing that happens is natural. Lightning strikes the ground not far from the car and the thunder that follows is deafening. The dog howls. The birthday boy pulls the dog onto his lap and presses his hands over the dog’s ears. All the boys, lanky limbs crisscrossing lanky limbs, talk one over the top of each other about how doggy ears hurt when noises are loud like thunder.
The woman behind the steering wheel pushes at wet strands of hair and sort of smiles. She looks enigmatic, like the Mona Lisa. That’s what the camera records. Being a mother is a state of being, like being Mona Lisa. The image of her as a mother who looks like the Mona Lisa conceals her occupation. She is a writer.
She galvanises the energy to start the car, a story beginning to unravel in her head. It’s about a birthday party that ends when lightning strikes.
[Acknowledgement: Luis Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000.]
An earlier version of this story first appeared in Staples, issue 7
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Alan Gould is an Australian poet, novelist and essayist. His seventh novel, The Lakewoman, was launched at The 2009 Melbourne Writers’ Festival, and his twelfth volume of poetry, Folk Tunes, has just been published by Salt. Among his many awards, he has won the NSW Premier’s Prize For Poetry (1981), The National Book Council Banjo Prize for Fiction (1992), The Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal For Literature, and The Grace Leven Award for his The Past Completes Me – Selected Poems 1973-2003.
The Mudda
Poets are born, they say, not made.
By the time of my own birth I was an over-cooked baby, having dallied in the interior of The Mudda for week after overcast week beyond the normal term. After such dalliance, little wonder my hankering to recover enchanted time.
So I, Claude Boon, begin by imagining The Mudda in that interval of my pre-birth. As my embryonic presence swelled her usually neat, Flemish frame it grew ungainly as a washtub, and needed to be hauled, ah, upstairs, uphill, upfront and upsadaisy, onto double-decker buses and into small black cars, and she, Boon-buoyant, Boon-weary, with the burden of me. Did she complain? I believe not. If she sat at table, I was a round under her grey smock like a great cheese remembered from the plenty of pre-war Holland. If she returned from wet Woolwich High Street where she had stood half an hour in the queue for a ration of sausages or liver, she felt my presence as a grapnel on her every fibre. Her patience, her resilience, were entering my character, as were some of the qualities of her Brabanter forbears, my clean complexion and open forehead, my good-natured nose and my eyes a little too trusting of the world, perhaps.
And if I pushed out my fist or my foot, how do I evoke the strangeness of her sensations? Here, did she sense it, was a live butterfly fluttering against the interior of a balloon, here was the gear-stick of a small black car pushed back and forth against her inner fabric?
‘Nou, we zullen zien wat er gaat gebeuren,’ she said, first in her own language to mask her impatience, then, to show politeness to the borough maternity nurse, ‘We must see what comes, of course.’
If the Mudda’s patience was sometimes tested, I appeared at ease with the situation. Through those weeks of the British winter and early spring I hunched in the placental tree-house, stem-fed by her magnificent system. Into my future flowed those exact proteins and vitamins she could extract from the spam, the herring, the dried egg of that tin-food era, the orange juice, rose hip syrup and extra allowance of milk allowed for this pregnancy by her green ration card. While the Pa beavered among his memos at the British War Office, I spent the day, either rocked asleep by the Mudda’s internal rhythms, or dreamily pushing that exploratory gear-stick against her womb wall.
Do embryos dream? Did my own lifelong attachment to reverie begin in the treehouse with some aural/maternal-fantasy? Is this where the protozoa of poems originate, for the muse is said to be a mother-figure.
Beglub-beglub pumped the Mudda’s heart, gloink, her intestinal plumbing eased itself, purrr, slid her blood along its Flemish conduits. Is it possible my proto-intellect was actually wired to the maternal dreaming during her final weeks of pregnancy in the Woolwich army quarter? From some trace-memory I possess, here is Mrs Boon dozing during the February afternoons, tiaras of raindrops agleam under the telegraph wires, while the scenes behind her eyelids show the imminent Boon, a spiked coronet on my round head that must surely tear her as I leave her. Then, in this phantasmagoria of a woman-with-child in a monarchic nation not her own, she watches as I grow away from her wounded body, recede to some altitude above her head like a gargoyle leering from the façade of one of those decorous, overbearing English cathedrals that her Englishman husband had shown her during his intervals of wartime leave.
Week to week, cell on cell, morula, blastocyst, trophoblast, from fertilised ovum to gargoyle I grew. Ears, limbs, testicles popped from me like mushrooms. Blood went beading along my arteries and capillaries; insulin was secreted; teeth aligned themselves below the gums in preparation for their future troublemaking. I gained the full human kit with the apparent exception of the will to move on from that original tree-house welfare state. So complacent was my attitude to being born, it was decided three weeks after my term I would need medical help to be induced into the world. Poeta nascitur, non fit.
While The Pa Read Milton
In fact I was not my parents’ first child, for there had been an elder sister, born at Dehra Dun in India in ’47 who survived only a few days. To safeguard my own emergence into the world therefore, it seems the Pa had arranged, at some expense, for Harley Street’s Sir John Cue to be at Mrs Boon’s side. Five months earlier, this obstetrician knight had assisted at the birth of the heir to the British throne, an attendance thought to give me an improved chance of safe arrival.
This may also account for the Mudda’s fantasy of my coronet, and in the longer term my sense of self-regard, this egotism materialising, as it were, at HRH favour.
My birth occurred at supper time on a March Friday in 1949 at one of the delivery rooms of the King’s College Hospital.
‘Hah, hah, hah,’ gasped the Mudda, who was a modest woman trying to recover her composure after a bodily event rather more public than she preferred. ‘Ferry kint, dank u wel.’
London’s Bow Bells did not ring for me, but outside the hospital window I gather the Thames sky did ooze a typical drizzle for this future minor Australian poet of the latter twentieth century. The 1949 streets were slimed with moisture as London families (like the Lucks of Third Avenue, Ilford) sat down to meals eked from whatever those green ration cards permitted; the spam, the rabbit pie, the dried egg scrambled to the insipid yellow of institutional soap, parsnip and cabbage boiled to a quattrocento artist’s corpse-pallor, or some originally orange winter vegetable similarly transmogrified.
On this, my opening night, the Pa sat halfway down the long corridor leading to the delivery room. He was, we must guess, without his supper. A well-thumbed, leather-bound volume was balanced on his knee and he looked up from his page only when he heard an ‘Ahem,’ and found the KBE with his case of medical instruments standing uncertainly before him. Having come directly from his desk at The War Office, my parent was still dressed in his service uniform, the tunic buttons glinting under the neon lights. Promptly he rose to attention in order to hear the obstetrician apprise him of the facts of my birth.
‘Colonel Boon,’ Sir John apparently chose his words, ‘You have become the parent of a somewhat serious-minded young fellow, if the first five minutes of a life are any guide.’
‘I am obliged to you,’ replied The Pa.
‘May I ask what you are reading?’ asked the knight.
‘I am reading the incomparable Milton.’
Keeping his finger in the page, the planet’s newest father held up the gold lettering on the spine of the book that it might be seen. The volume had accompanied the Pa during his war service with 43rd Division from Normandy to Bremerhaven so the tooled red leather of the cover was scarred by items, military and otherwise, that had chafed against it in one haversack or another during those eleven months of attritional European warfare.
‘I understand,’ replied the knight. ‘One is mindful at such moments as this of the need to touch the sublime.’
‘My feeling exactly,’ said the Pa.
‘Your wife is a foreigner, I see.’
‘Mrs Boon is Dutch, from Breda in the Northern Brabant.’
‘Just so,’ replied Sir John, (who perhaps felt he must disarm the Colonel’s tendency to over-explain when rank was an uncertainty in conversation). ‘Of course your son will be entitled to call himself a Cockney if he wishes. Earshot of the bells and so on.’
‘He will undoubtedly turn himself into something.’
‘Do you have in mind a name for the child?’
‘We have agreed on Claude Evelyn Boon.’
‘Claude from Claudius, just so. You have chosen stateliness there, I think.’ The knight rocked contemplatively back and forth on the balls of his feet. ‘And Evelyn!’ Sir John considered these syllables next.
‘As an obstetrician, you see, one takes an interest in names. Evelyn, Aveline, your choice here derives from the French word for the hazel which was a nut denoting wisdom in olden days, did you know?’
‘I did not. I am obliged to you for informing me.’
‘May I wish the very best to the three of you?’
‘You may indeed.’
At this the knight apparently took a step or two, then paused in his departure.
Let me pause to consider him. This person’s hands were the first to touch my own person. For some moments he would have cradled me, perhaps cleaned me, weighed me, and many years later, when I was intrigued by the remotest and smallest influences present in the formation of character, I was led to wonder what quiet influence those hands might have conferred upon me.
This was not altogether self-regarding whimsy on my part. Twenty-eight years later, in an encounter that was extraordinary for its casual coincidence, Boon, the babe now grown to youngish manhood, would meet and receive kindness at the hands of his obstetrician. That meeting must await its place in this story, but it would allow me to know that Sir John possessed a pleasant face, more that of a pastrymaker than a knight perhaps, and the upshot of this is that I am pleased by the thought of having come into the world where my first contact was a kindly stranger. The spring of natural charity in people has mystified me, and I will meet a diversity of kindly strangers in the travels that these pages record.
Now the knight, whose head would tremble a little as he struggled to express a perplexity, was confiding to the Pa. ‘And yet, you see, Colonel, if one only knew what that ‘best’ might include in these distracting times, Iron Curtains, atomic bombs and such palaver.’
The Pa, I should mention, was a staunch Cromwellian in outlook and therefore in the habit of providing answers that were to the purpose. Here before him was a figure of social rank who had mislaid that vital self-assurance proper to rank, particularly when it was needed to sustain morale in nuclear times.
‘One strives,’ the Pa delivered his view, ‘to give each child opportunity to discover such interests as may match a livelihood and that this match should please a commonwealth.’
Did this grandiloquence belong more to the floor of The House Of Commons than a chat in a hospital corridor? My Pa was perhaps more parliamentary than colloquial in his relations with both me, and all his acquaintance. His work in military education, and his papers on disadvantaged learners lay behind this conviction.
‘Just so,’ Sir John shifted on his feet.
And now there was an awkward pause, as of two men who might strike up an acquaintance could they fathom each other’s tone. Then they shook hands and Sir John receded down the corridor while the new father stood under the icy lights wondering whether he might now put aside the incomparable Milton to visit Mrs Boon. Along that corridor there may have been other delivery rooms producing other 1949 children, but no one intruded upon the colonel’s own small dilemma on that spot of linoleum.
For my Pa was a gentlemanly colonel, divided between his knowledge that there were matters to face and his decent uncertainty as to whether it was proper for the paternal person to end the mother’s privacy quite so early after that mysteriously female event of a birth. Resolving against doubt, and slipping Milton into his briefcase, the Pa set out for the door to the delivery room.
(from The Poets’ Stairwell, a picaresque novel-in-progress.)
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Maya Khosla was raised in India, England, Algeria, Burma, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. Those cultures as well as her background in biology strongly shaped her writing. As an independent wildlife biologist, Maya is comfortable wandering through oak woodlands or waist-deep in silty waters (wearing chest waders). Her books include “Keel Bone,” (poetry from Bear Star Press; 2003 Dorothy Brunsman Award), “Web of Water: Life in Redwood Creek,” (nonfiction from Golden Gate National Park Conservancy Press, 1997) and “Heart of the Tearing,” (poetry from Red Dust Press 1995). Performing, teaching and writing have earned her awards from the Headlands Center for the Arts, Poets and Writers Inc., and the Ludvig Vogelstein Foundation.
Red-Tailed Hawk
The flowers you give
are my maps. If I am ever lost
their petals’ scent will pull me
toward your musk again.
January 1, 2008
It’s a cloud-lidded morning. Thoroughly soaked, the fenceposts lining my little backyard are stained so dark the lichen growing on them looks fluorescent green by comparison. Rain is a mark of auspicious beginnings, though Michael just walked out of my condo with his spare motorcycle helmet and running clothes.
“I’m moving to the Philippines, Tash,” he declared before leaving. “It’s home.”
He has often mused about emigrating. But the emphasis on home gave his announcement a ring of conviction I haven’t heard before. We were standing in my condo hallway next to the stairs going up to my bedroom, where we shared New Years resolutions last night. I searched the olive-green flecks mixed into the browns of his pupils that drew me in from the moment of our first date, years ago, when he lifted me into the air in spite of a sore left shoulder.
But this morning his eyes were too dark to see the greens. He sank to the edge of my second stair to tie his shoelaces.
Michael was raised in the Philippines. His Dominican mother, siblings and the online game company he works for are all based there. I’ve visited Manila, Kanlubang, and Makiling with him. I too have most of my family overseas, in India. So I sympathize with his sense of home in a distant country of seven thousand-plus islands. It’s the warmth, the ability to buy a single cigarette, to figure out ways to return home from office for an afternoon nap. It’s the tropical air that can get so heated and heavy with moisture that when it breaks into drizzle, it’s hard to notice the difference.
He stood again, filling my condo hallway.
“Give me a hug? I won’t be seeing you again.” He leaned forward, arms reaching, the fingers of his square hands spread. His lips were in a pout, his eyes focused, intent.
I shook my head. As if yielding meant he would leave my place, California, the country. As if leaving without that hug meant he would have to reconsider.
When he turned to fumble with the front door locks and pick up the helmet, his right hand came within inches of me. I felt an urge to grab and shake it vigorously. He slipped out and I held the door open, breathing in the scent of post-drizzle moisture.
Sun behind veils, salts of loss on the tongue. An Anna’s hummingbird dashed past in a streak of shiny vermilion, wings beating about eighty times a minute, like a pulse racing over words held down. Its speed emphasized its ground level opposite, a two-legged trapped as if in torpor, unable to rush out and beckon her partner back.
It’s quiet here; guilt deadbolts me in. I made him leave. My hallway looks whole shades dingier. The dining table and its contents, two freshly drained tea mugs, a persimmon and a sliver of leftover fruit loaf, shrink-wrapped in plastic, hold the weight of a recent conclusion. Upstairs, my unmade bed is too tousled to allow for a quick smoothing over. It needs to be stripped and redone.
The blooms he brought me yesterday are louder in his absence—red so saturated it looks wet. They are a reminder. We had planned a morning hike. The remainder of today was supposed to form neatly around the crystal of its there-and-back symmetry, the sweet scents and rush of blood and breath.
Last week’s storms have filled the North Bay’s soils and streams and enriched its forests and meadows with every color except this drained gray of sky. I have spent twelve winters here working out in the wild, so I know. Coho salmon are torpedoing up towards their deaths against the flow of swollen creeks. Frogs are emitting creaky calls from under umbrellas of dripping ferns. Bulb-bright highlights of new growth are re-greening every limb-tip of every bishop pine, redwood and fir. When a hawk alights, the branch gripped in its circlets of claws will shake and sway and splash. Winter wrens and varied thrushes in the vicinity will fall silent.
I haven’t the energy to emerge.
Michael is driving south to his home in Novato. Inside his car, he will switch the air vent back to ‘cold’ since I’m not with him. He will brush his hair impatiently with his left hand, the dark curls springing back after each stroke as if in protest. His eyes will be locked ahead as he waits for a chance to enter the right lane, glide past the slower car and swing back across highway dots and dashes.
The New Years resolutions we bantered about seem utterly irrelevant. Mine included accomplishing symbolic nuggets of what I hope to achieve within the next three hundred and sixty four days. “First thing’s first: begin it feeling new,” my mother used to launch forth. “Wear pressed clothes without a trace of past perfumes. Take six deep breaths at an open window. Make modest wishes…”
I do. Today they were good food and exercise, fresh air and water, a respectable chunk of work and a search for bobcats, raptors and frogs. These were the seeds I wanted to set, the emblems of my intentions for 2109.
Moving to the window, I twist the angle of the faux bamboo blinds and put my face close. A cold smell is all. A few weeks ago Michael gripped my battery-powered drill in both hands and worked on each fitting with single-minded diligence, asking me to hand him a nail here, a bracket or a blind there, stepping back to view it before moving on to the next one. Hours later he had installed them in all my windows. We whispered our verdict in unison.
“Wow!”
He drew down the new blind, placed my drill inside its blue box on the coffee table and closed the distance between us. When we kissed, a slight leak in his right nostril wet my upper lip. I moved to wipe myself and he drew back to clean his nose with a quick apology. He was just as quick to advance again. The thudding in my ears blended with the salts and frictions of touch and the nose-drip was forgotten — until we parted to climb the stairs and the same wet spot chilled with evaporation.
When I get the angle correct, cloud-light glances off the blinds’ buttery hue and lights up the red and yellow cushions scattered across two futons that frame one corner of my living room. On the shelf in my downstairs closet is the new brocade sweatshirt I planned to throw on before leaving. Next to it a blank space where Michael’s white motorcycle helmet was stored. The sight propels me upstairs. On the top shelf of my bedroom closet, his running tea shirt and shorts were kept folded next to my field shirts that have clung to their mud-and algae-stains through wash cycles. He’s neater than I am. He’s meticulous. Even the absence of clothes looks rectangular.
I can’t bring myself to move my shirts and woolen shawls over to fill the empty space. Leaving it empty falls in the same category as refusing him the goodbye-hug. It’s a safeguard that could protect against an absence so complete it’s irreversible. Against losing my grip on those arms that looked weighty with rest just hours ago in this room.
The dishes, counters, and tabletop are clean, the bed made. I pressed the persimmon from its ends so the flesh gave, easily, two halves of a whole. The orange flesh had the consistency of an overripe mango but was sweeter, chalkier, full of rich sugars and salts. It was comfort food.
I threw away the fruit loaf that began our quarrel. I had taken it out of the freezer and warmed it in lieu of my homemade date-oatmeal bars, which I had run out of.
Michael eyed the density of fruit and nut between bites.
“Who’s been here? You had a whole loaf a couple of days ago.”
“This? It’s been sitting in the freezer,” I argued.
Still chewing, he scanned my living room and shook his head.
“I don’t think so. Look at those two cushions lying by the fireplace. You’ve had company. Recently.”
I tried to remember when my friends Susan, Mella, and Sally had been over, whether they’d eaten much of the loaf. We had met sometime before Christmas, probably two weeks ago. Then I realized it didn’t matter what I said.
Michael was chuckling, shaking his head. “Tash, it’s obvious someone’s been here. Cozy evening with him?”
“You know what, Michael? Enough.”
He stared at his empty tea mug as though making a calculation. Then he sprang up. “You know what? It’s obvious you’re involved with someone. I’ll do the same.”
“I think you need to leave,” I heard myself say. He responded with the wide-eyed gaze of a frightened child. Then he went around the corner and I listened to the thump-thump of his feet up the stairs.
It’s 1:44 p.m. When I get online, Michael is there too.
“I am completely devasted and cant even breath,” he begins his chat.
He’s back. Except the misspellings reveal a carelessness rare for him.
He types, “I just can’t imagine being without the love of my life and yet I bring us so much pain and turmoil.”
It’s a shot of lucid light searing the gloom. Perhaps we’ll get through this. He writes that even his divorce was easier than losing me.
“You are not losing me!” I reply.
“It’s this seroquel,” he writes. “It’s making me crazy.” Seroquel is his latest antidepressant.
Two hundred and ten emoticons of a face in tears arrive on my screen. I have never understood how he does that so fast. I want to reach through the electronic windows separating us and cover the hands that type unfiltered fears and push the return button with the urgency of one who is trying to check his fall in a dream.
He does not mention the fruit loaf or cushions.
It’s a little over a mile to the cement-lined ponds and greens of Sonoma State University. I’ve worn my new sweatshirt for ritual’s sake, and a rain jacket over it. There are footprints ahead, but no one else is walking the Copeland Creek Trail now. No one is playing in the football field south of my path. The creek is invisible behind a riparian world that has risen like fire; swaths of green and nubs of new leaves-to-be are pointing skyward like a multitude of hopes. Their savings account, groundwater, is rich and gurgles underground like a secret.
There is a slap and suck to each step through muddy softness. Crossing a puddle the brown of soil-flour, I think of the hike we missed this morning. The same eight miles through Point Reyes National Seashore along Bear Valley Creek became a habit for us long before Michael’s counselor began giving him prescriptions for antidepressants. We stuck with the eight: Bear Valley Trail to Meadow, Meadow to Sky, Sky to Mt. Whittenberg and back down to Bear Valley. Is there some significance to our missing out on the first of the year? Was it best, asking him to leave when I did?
A white-crowned sparrow clings to a spindle-thin twig among a perfusion of bare branches. Its gold beak is an ember opening to release a series of plaintive trills. I watch with binoculars. It catches sight of me and dips into the creek-side tangle.
A red-tailed hawk circles on the air thermals above. Its tail swivels and I catch a glimpse the red dorsal feathers. My binoculars magnify the down-turned head, shifting slightly from side to side as it scans the football field. Hunting is a swift dream, mired in instinct but crisp with the single-minded focus of pursuit.
In a breath, it bunches up its wings, extends its claws and plunges fieldward. A predator’s drive looks so sure, yet it is in the dark about itself. The wings unfurl as claws touch grass. Now it’s hopping, now still. Apparently it has missed its target.
A few seasons ago I encountered a fallen red-tail. That too was a cloud-wrapped day. I was surveying for burrowing owls in rolling grasslands close to Altamont Pass, where wind turbines cover the ridge-tops for miles. The raptor must have collided with the turbine roaring above us.
“If you throw a large cloth over it,” a woman at the nearest wildlife rehabilitation center explained when I called, “it will calm down. If you don’t have one, back off or you’ll risk having your wrists lacerated.”
I shed my fleece jacket and spread it wide, measuring. It was no large cloth. I made a split-second decision and advanced in terror. The bird stood regal, head rising, hooked beak bared, crest feathers standing. They looked damp—rain or sweat? Every inch of its foot and a half tall body was designed to intimidate.
Still, I advanced closer. It took one hop away. The left wing was dragging in a pathetic antithesis of the poise that was using up so much of its body’s meager energy savings. It raised the talons of one leg at me with a predator’s regal fury. The beak was still bared. I couldn’t afford to hesitate. Let instant darkness calm it.
I had been given good rules over the phone; I had sat through training classes in Golden Gate Raptor Observatory before that. But when the moment closed in, adrenalin-fired fear eclipsed all thought.
I dropped my fleece on the bird and all was very quiet. I bent double and gathered up the raptor in my jacket. It had calmed down— immediately. It sat still, trapped, light as held breath.
Walking uphill with arms outstretched, I was panting soon. My car was parked under the wind turbine and its wails grew and grew as I neared the ridgeline. Inside my jacket, all was so still that there were moments when I was convinced the red-tail had slipped out. I turned back once, but the capture spot was already out of view.
Was it comfortable inside? Would it heal, hover in the updrafts again to decipher—the way no human eye can—the day-glow ultraviolet ribbons of mouse urine, the twitching, racing maneuvers that must look utterly futile from a bird’s eye view?
And most important, had I folded the broken wing correctly, given it enough breathing room?
I didn’t dare check. Awareness of a human face would have caused more stress to the bird. The questions were torture, though. They haven’t left me, though I now know one of the answers.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sushma Joshi is a Nepali writer and filmmaker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. End of the World, her book of short stories, was long-listed for the Frank O’ Connor International Short Story Award in 2009. She co-edited New Nepal, New Voices (Rupa 2008). Art Matters, a book of art essays, was supported by the Alliance Francaise De Katmandou. Inspired by Nepali history and contemporary politics, her fiction and reportage deal with issues of social inequality, environment and gender. Sound of Silence (1997) her first documentary, was screened at the New Asian Currents at the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival. Water (2000) was screened on the Q and A with Riz Khan on CNN International, and the UN World Water Forum in Kyoto. The Escape (2006), a short about a teacher targeted by rebels, was accepted to the Berlinale Talent Campus. Joshi was born and grew up in Kathmandu. She studied in Dowhill School, Kurseong, for four years before finishing her education in Mahendra Bhawan and Siddhartha Vanasthali Institute. She received a BA in international relations from Brown University in 1996. She has a MA in anthropology from the New School, NY, and a MA in English Literature from Middlebury College, Vermont.Joshi contributes The Global and the Local, a weekly op-ed, to Nepal’s leading English daily, The Kathmandu Post.
Shelling Peas and History Lessons
“And then? And then?” Sapana asked, six-year-old impatience catching up with the slow pace of thought of an old woman.
“Yes, yes,” said the old woman absently, caught up in a world that was a long time away from this hot, dusty May afternoon. A long time ago, when the mist covered the early mornings, and the ice froze on top of wells. Long ago, when she was still young enough to clamber barefoot on the winding, stony paths of the hills. Young enough to drink the icy water of the springs and let it wash away the pain in her legs. Young enough to nibble the chutro berries from the branches like the goats, and then sit down with a sharp splinter to take out the thorns embedded in the soles of her feet.
Bubu moved easily between these two worlds. This hot afternoon, with the sun baking the tiles of the verandah as she sat in the shade with the six-year-old in her yellow frock, shelling peas together to the distant roar of the traffic. And that other world of brown dust between the toes, the water that sprung out of the hills like a blessing, the echoes of people calling from one valley to the other.
“It was a long time ago. Sixty, sixty-five years ago? Maybe more. I was small then, about eight maybe. Just a little older than you are now. All the little ones would be sent into the hills every morning to search for firewood.”
Sapana dragged a straw mat down from the wall so she could sit comfortably on the scorching tiles. She was the only one at home. Buba and Ama were in the office, and so were all her uncles and aunts. They would get home only in the evening. Her school ended at three pm, unlike all her cousins, who got off at five. Sapana, left alone in an empty house, had finally wandered up to the roof, where Bubu was engaged in endless chores. Bubu, who usually did not say a whole lot, sometimes could be egged on to reveal a parable or ukkan-tukki that Sapana had never heard before. The old woman, with a turban of faded red cloth wrapped around her head, continued to shell the peas. The two green halves exploded under her calloused fingers, pop-pop, like corn popping open in heat.
“The jungles were still very thick then, not like today, where you have to walk for half a day if you want to find a tree,” said Bubu, stretching out her long legs in front of her. She was tall, taller than some of the men in the house. A faded choli was tied around her thin chest. Sapana could occasionally catch a glimpse of a withered breast through the gap in the middle of her blouse, which didn’t close. “I don’t know how the people will manage when those start running out. Anyway, we wouldn’t have to go very far those days. We would fill our patuka with popped corn, and eat that when the sun got hot in the sky.”
“Just popcorn? Nothing else?” asked Sapana. She popped a pea and felt the tender juice spurt out in her mouth. The softness of the green halves turned to pulp between her teeth. She stuck her tongue out to see the squelchy remains.
“When we went to get the firewood, we would take the goats with us to graze, and some of the younger children would drink straight out of the teats. I never did that though. Disgusting habit,” said Bubu, wrinkling her patrician nose. Bubu noticed the empty pea-shells wilting in the heat, and pushed them under the shadow cast by the huge bottlebrush tree. The red brushes hung down in drunken lethargy, filled with the sweet honey hum of a thousand bees.
“Then there were the berries and amla that grew in the forest. The forest floor would be covered with them, we would not even have to climb the trees. Sometimes, if it was the season, we would put some soybeans and peanuts into our patuka too. Ah, those were delicious. You have to roast them over the hadi pot to get the flavor out. Now I don’t even have the teeth to bite them…”
“But you always grind them up and put them in your tea,” said Sapana, pulling out the ragged edges of the straw mat. She now had a long straw in her hand, and she was carefully weaving the two ends into little Os to make a pair of spectacle frames.
“That’s right, Baba. I shouldn’t complain. I have all my cares taken care of.”
There was a long silence as the woman drifted off into another reverie. Her hands moved swiftly, automatically, her mind elsewhere. Sapana’s fingers slipped and slid over the pods, unable to pop them open like her Bubu was doing so effortlessly. She wondered when she would be able to shell like the old woman, when she would be able to pick them up and pop them open with speed and efficiency without mangling anything. When she would not have to rip them open with her teeth, and she could have an entire bowl of round peas without tooth-marks in them. All of the peas she had managed to extract in various stages of wholeness had either rolled into the grass or ended up discreetly in her own appreciative mouth.
She was more a hindrance than help, and she knew it. She also knew that Bubu’s patience was limited. In a short while, she would start getting irritated by either the flow of questions, or the wasteful shelling, and that would be the end of Sapana’s daily dose of both stories and peas. Sapana, with six-year-old wisdom, knew that she had to be judicious in order not to cut off the flow to either of these precious things. So the peas were popped into the mouth with uncanny timing each time Bubu looked away, and the solicitations only piped in when it looked like the old woman was too lost in her own thoughts to notice the prompting.
Bubu tolerated Sapana’s presence, her inquisitiveness, more than she tolerated many other things. The child was her little baba, her darling. She was not a demonstrative woman, and she had strict rules of impartiality towards her nine charges. But there was something about Sapana, who was the smallest and followed her around mercilessly, begging for lumps of sugar and stories with equal insistence, that made her special among all the children she had nursed. Perhaps she was still too innocent, and didn’t yet realize the rules of the world. Perhaps she would grow up to become a cold-hearted woman who would forget old Bubu, like all the other children before her had done.
Nobody even bothered to talk to her nowadays. She was just there, the servant who had been around for so long that people took her for granted, like the giant empty grain-jars in the basement. But Sapana still ran to her with her questions.
“How do you know a spider’s web brings wealth to a home?
“Why can’t Ama touch the loukat tree when she is bleeding?”
“Why is Mami being nasty to Sanuama?“
“Because a spider is lucky.”
“Because when a woman is bleeding she makes the crops die.”
“Because Mami thinks Sanuama is not doing enough work, and that she should stay at home instead of going to college.”
And then the answers, which were not really answers, would elicit more questions: Why is a spider lucky? How can a bleeding woman make the crops die? And why shouldn’t Sanuama go to college if her brothers can? The questions were never-ending, an answer promptly giving birth to the next inquiry, in an unending web of interrogation.
Bubu looked forwards to the times when the little girl would come running up, asking her slyly if she could help with shelling the peas, emptying herself of all of her questions in her head, and demanding to know the old woman’s too. The old woman hadn’t talked about her life for sixty-five years. Perhaps she had mentioned her brother to the woman who came to sell turmeric. It was difficult for her to talk about her life. Nobody had ever bothered to ask her, and she would not have told them anything even if they had asked. Indeed, why should they? But Sapana needed to know.
“What about the tigers? You said there were tigers in the jungle. Weren’t you scared they were going to carry you away?”
The old woman laughed, the laugh instantly turning to a hoarse cough. “The tigers never came near us. We would see them only from a distance; they were as scared of us as we were of them. I know of only one person who was attacked by a tiger, and that was by accident. He was walking at night alone, the idiot. You should never walk alone in the jungle at night, you never know what might happen.”
Sapana held her breath. It was one of those rare moments when the old woman’s mind rambled into exciting territory. She hoped Bubu would not lose her train of thought. Often times, Bubu would decide to stop the story randomly in the middle. Once in a while, she followed her stories to the end.
“He came too near to the cubs. The mother flew at him, and who can blame her. One has to protect one’s children, especially when their father is not around…”
“Did you have any children, Bubu?” asked Sapana.
There was silence. The traffic continued its muted roar in the distance. The koel bird went coo-hoo. Sapana felt a shock of fear at having breached an unknown taboo. Bubu had never talked about her children before.
“Did you?” Her voice muted was with fright, but she pressed on, because she was six and at six one knows only that one has to know, even when it is forbidden to know.
“Uuhuh. Long time ago. I had a son,” said Bubu. Her voice, rough as sandpaper, sounded almost soft.
“Where’s he now? Is he as big as me?” Sapana asked.
Bubu looked at the small figure sitting on the mat, straw frames perched on her nose. “He’s gone,” she replied gruffly. What would her son have looked like at the same age, she wondered.
“Oh.” Sapana felt a rush of pure shame, mixed with guilt. But death was a topic too close to her heart for her to stop wondering. The shame was overshadowed by the desire that had arisen to understand this sudden opening up of the secrets of Bubu’s life. Why had she never told Sapana that she had had a baby? Why had she kept it a secret? She knew it had to do with death, which was shadowy and smelt of old people and brought tears, hushed telephone conversations, and the puzzling disappearance of adults. Her father had not returned home when his great-uncle had died. He had re-appeared, with a shaved head, dressed all in white cotton, down to his tennis shoes, thirteen days later. Old people died all the time, and they were always talking about it right in front of her. But they always whispered when a baby died.
“How did he die? Was he sick like Prerana diju? Will she die too? I don’t want her to die. We were planning to climb the loukat tree when she got well again. Now she’s covered with red blotches.” Sapana imagined her cousin being carried away on the back of men on green bamboo, tied up in a saffron shroud. She quickly wiped the thought out of her mind.
“Now don’t you two go up that old tree. Those branches are rickety. A branch might break and then you would be all set for the next six months. You saw what happened to Prakash, didn’t you?” Bubu asked sternly, waving a bony finger in front of Sapana’s face.
“He said he was Tarzan and he jumped out of the tree,” Sapana said, jumping up from the mat to show Bubu how Prakash Dada had done it. “He was right on top of a branch, and then he started to jump, and the branch went winggg!, and he fell. Like this,” she said, rolling on the floor to demonstrate.
“And broke his leg,” added Bubu.
“He has a white cast on his leg now,” said Sapana. Her cousin’s dare-devil exploit, which had brought him so much pain and popularity, had taken on the status of heroism in her mind. She could not help feeling that she needed a white cast, just like all her other cousins had done before her. Perhaps breaking a bone was like losing teeth. Everybody has to do it, and if you don’t, there must be something wrong with you, she thought.
“Are you planning to climb that tree?” queried Bubu, hearing the admiration in Sapana’s voice.
“Nooo,” said Sapana. I can just climb the tree up to the fork between the two branches, and just sit there, she thought. I won’t jump on the branches.
“Yes? No?” Bubu asked, waving her finger threateningly. “Do I hear a lie?”
“No, I won’t do it,” Sapana said quickly, sensing threats bubbling in Bubu’s mind.
Bubu, satisfied, went back to her peas. “Of course, Prerana’s not going to die, you silly child. She’s just got the measles. Everybody gets it,” she said, wiping the sweat from her brows.
“Did Buba get it? Did Ama get it? Did you, Bubu?” Sapana looked at Bubu, her skin hanging like a soft, washed leather pouch from the bones of her face. It was unblemished, except for two big, black moles next to her lips.
“Sure I did. I got it particularly bad. I had to stay in bed for months,” Bubu said. She remembered the hours of loneliness sleeping in the bed, recovering from sickness. But her grandmother had been there to brew her concoctions, and she had slowly recovered.
“Did everyone in your house catch it? Mami says I mustn’t go near Prerana Diju because I’ll get it, then it’ll pass to everyone, even the baby. Did your son get measles too?” Sapana added.
“No. He was too young to get measles,” Bubu answered.
“So how did he die?” Sapana knew she was going to get scolded very soon, but she had to know. She wet the tip of her index finger with spit and traced an elaborate face with three eyes on the hot tile.
“He died when I came down into the valley.” Bubu’s face, turned slightly away, looked lost in thought.
“Why did you come down, then? Why did you not stay at home?” Sapana asked. The saliva had evaporated instantly, leaving her with nothing.
“Stop asking so many questions. It’s rude. Women should not ask so many questions,” Bubu answered shortly.
“But I don’t want you to be all alone. Where are your Mamu and Buba?” Sapana asked, distressed. She could not believe Bubu was holding back this essential information from her.
“Well, it’s a little too late for me to be having a mother and father, let me tell you.” said the old woman, chuckling. “My mother and father are long dead. They lived in Bhimsen Tole, where my brother is now, and… “
“When is your brother coming, Bubu?” Sapana interrupted. Bubu complained constantly about how her brother did not come to visit her more often. Sapana had been five when she first saw Bubu’s brother. They had sat outside on the bench, talking for hours in low voices. Sapana, running up to sit next to Bubu, had felt uncomfortable, as if she was not supposed to be there. Bubu had turned to look at her with a far-away glance. Sapana knew Bubu wanted to be alone, so she had left, reluctantly. Sapana felt jealous of the brother, who only came rarely but yet got such lavish attention. Bubu belongs to our family!, she wanted to clarify to the brother. But he was so big, and had such a gruff voice, that she decided it was safer not to say it. Maybe he wanted to take Bubu back to the village. Maybe Bubu would decide she no longer wanted to live with them, pack her boxes, and leave. Bubu’s brother, in his long-drawn out drawl, talked about whose land had been bought and sold, whose daughters had gotten married, whose sons had left the village to go to the city. Two days later, he left, carrying a tin trunk filled with clothes that Bubu had bought with her savings.
“Uhh, who knows,” went on Bubu, without pausing. “He tells me he has too many things to do in the village. But he’s not too busy to come down when he needs the money. He was pampered because he was the only son. Not me. I was the eldest among eight.” Bubu shooed a crow that had been hopping closer and closer, head tilted consideringly on one side, eyeing the bowl of peas.
“I didn’t get to live with my parents very long. I was married off to another village seven kos away when I was nine years old. Same age as your Priti Diju. Just two years older than you, my girl.”
“Weren’t you sad about leaving all your friends, Bubu? Did you tell them that you wanted to live at home?” Sapana asked, troubled now. She imagined Prerana Diju getting married and going away to another place seven kos away. She didn’t even know how big a mile was. Maybe it was far away as India, or China, or even farther. How horrible. Then she would never be able to play with her Diju again.
“That would have done me a lot of good now, wouldn’t it,” said Bubu derisively. The old woman had a bite to her that could sometimes scare the children. “It was different in those days. Not like now, where you have all these girls old enough to be the mothers of five babies staying at home. Behaving like children themselves. They have no shame nowadays. All the girls then were married by eight or nine. If one was not married by then, people would begin to think there was something wrong with the girl.”
Sapana did not like it when Bubu got started to get into these frightening moods, when she suddenly became stern and started talking about marrying girls off. The worst was usually when she started singing:
euti chori, mayaki dori, abha kasle lane ho
One daughter, a thread of love, I wonder who will take her away.
Sapana hated that song. She maintained a cautious silence.
“My parents were lucky to find me my husband. He was the son of a rich family. His family was rich, they were. Owned seven cows and hillsides of land,” Bubu reminisced almost triumphantly.
“I’ll be seven in four months,” Sapana reminded Bubu. She wanted Bubu to know that she was too small to be married.
“Yes, that’s right. Seven, or eight? Seven, I think. I was nine when I got married. My husband was older, much older. Twenty-three-years older…”
“Twenty-three-years?” Sapana could not fathom this age difference. It sounded enormous.
The old woman looked at her with something like slightly condescending contempt; an almost benign malignancy. She alarmed Sapana when she became like this, almost as if she would declare that girls should still get married at nine even in these changed times. “We weren’t sitting at home going to school like you, Baba. We got married early. People didn’t look for husbands the same age, as they do nowadays. I got pregnant when I was thirteen.”
“Where’s your husband now?” Sapana asked, trying to change the conversation. She sneaked another pea into her mouth as the old woman turned to get a broom to sweep up the pods.
“The river took him. There was a massive flood, one, two years after we were married. The bridge was swept away. Then the men went down to see if they could re-build it. They say he went too close. There were lots of rocks under the water that you could not really see…”
” Did your Sasu kick you out of her house, like Sukumel did when Daya’s husband died?” Bubu swatted away the little hand that was sneaking into the bowl of peas as if it were a fly. Sapana retreated hastily. The old woman could be deceptive, appearing to be lost in her thoughts when she really wasn’t at all.
“My mother-in-law was a kind woman,” Bubu said reflectively. “Kinder than the rest. She let me live in the house until the baby was born. She could easily have sent me back to my parents house, but she didn’t. Then they thought I would have a better life if I came down to the valley, worked at one of the big houses. So they sent me down.”
“Did you want to leave your village, Bubu?” asked Sapana, anxiously. She wanted to think that Bubu was here because she wanted to be here, not because she had been forced to.
“It didn’t matter what I wanted,” said Bubu, tiredly. “Who would listen to me? But I wanted to leave too. I thought my son would have a better life down here. Old man Astha helped me to get into the Ranaji’s house. Then they sent me here because the Ranaji’s wife didn’t want me in her house.”
“Ranaji’s wife sent you here because she was afraid her husband would want to marry you. Because you were pretty. Ruku told me. She said the wife must have been jealous of you. Ruku said so.”
“Ruku is an old chatterbox,” said Bubu, straightening up and lifting her chin in the air. “She talks too much. When I came here, the eldest Dulahi-saab had just given birth. She couldn’t suckle her own child. She was a princess, you know, and princesses didn’t do that then. She was the granddaughter of Chandra Shamsher Maharaja. I hear the young women do whatever they want nowadays. Feeding children out of bottles. Whoever heard of such nonsense. The women now, they have no sense.”
“Darshana drinks out of a bottle. Will she grow up to have no sense too?”
“No. She’s a bright child. She will have sense. Anyway, they hired me to be the dhai for Mohan-raja. Yes, he was a little baby then. I remember it as if it were yesterday. Now he’s balding, he looks old.” Bubu had been happy at the idea of nursing two babies. She had imagined that the two of them would suckle her together, one on the left, the other on the right. “But they said there was not enough milk.”
“And then?” Sapana held her breath. The peas were all shelled. Inside her closed hand Sapana had a fistful of peas that she had removed from the bowl and which she was saving for later. The old woman usually went inside the kitchen after all the vegetables were done. Would she leave Sapana hanging in the middle?
Bubu ambled around for a bit, then dragged out the comb from underneath the straw mat and started to comb her hair. “So my son had to be sent away. They gave him to Hira to look after. Remember the old woman with goitre who comes here and brings us bay leaves? That was Hira.” Bubu raked the bamboo comb through her hair. “She used to come here occasionally, so the mistress asked her to look after my child for a bit of money.” She stopped to pull out the strands of silver hair entangled in the bamboo teeth. Sapana knew there was no need for prompting. The old woman was talking almost as if she was all alone.
“I remember that last day, holding him in my arms, feeling him breath before Hira took him into her back. She stopped coming to the house after that. I heard she used to come looking for me with the child in her arms, but nobody called me because they thought that if I was upset that would effect the milk.”
The sun slowly dipped down through the purple blooms of the jackaranda trees. A loud clamoring broke the silence as the crows came back home to roost in the bottlebrush branches. “And then?” said Sapana, underneath her breath.
“So then I never saw my child again. I heard he died six months later.” Bubu had found out about the death of her child only two years later. They had told her he was well and thriving. She had asked the mistress to give all of her salary to Hira. Hira later told Bubu that she never received any money, not even the promised stipend. Hira said she gave him all the food she had in the house, but that was just rice, and he couldn’t eat that, and she did not have the money to buy him any milk.
“She said that when he died he was just skin and bones…” Bubu’s face, pure silhouette in the sunset, was fathomless. But Sapana felt her pain, musky and old, curling up like smoke in the evening air.
A pack of street dogs started to howl, cutting through the sounds of the temple-bells. Sapana felt the loneliness in a way she never had before, a sharp cutting loneliness that seemed to transmit from the old woman and seep into her throat, making her heavy from hurting. She wanted to say something to comfort Bubu, but no words came. She waited, feeling the pain, dark blue as the night sky that was starting to descend. Slowly, the old woman picked up the bowl of peas, and walked into the kitchen. A few seconds later, a small bottle filled with kerosene and a wick flickered alight onto the surface of the windowsill. Only then did the little girl follow her inside.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Shannon Burns is a writer who lives in Adelaide.
The Translator
I am, you should know, by trade, a translator, which is to say I know several languages, and I can turn one language into another, as it were, so I am no amateur to this, whatever it is, if there is a name for it, which I doubt, since I haven’t come across it, and I have come across a lot of names, in many languages, but not the name for this, to what we are doing, or what I am doing, or what the world is doing with us both, whether we like it or not – and whether or not we like it I cannot honestly say.
I can turn one language into another, yet you, it would seem, have no language at all, you can barely turn your thoughts into sounds and gestures. The best I get from you is your moaning and biting, and the way you wring your hands, if they are in fact hands, since they seem to me to be somewhat like hands but not completely functional.
In any event, you won’t let me look at them closely. Every time I get near enough to study them you move away. If you are in your corner you move to the other side of the room, or you growl, or you foil my attempts in some other way, by sitting on them, for instance, or by screaming so loudly it hurts my ears.
When you scream, I am the one who is forced to move to the other side of the room, which leads me to imagine, sometimes, as I am scurrying away, that I have in fact taken on your body as you scurry away from me, from my desire to see your hands, which are in some sense sacred to you, and untouchable, although you touch them yourself, but always as if to protect them from being touched by someone else, by something else, since you won’t touch anything with your hands, other than yourself, which leads me to wonder whether they are hands at all, since hands are surely for touching, and if they do not touch perhaps they cease to be hands, and if they are in some way misshapen perhaps they cease to be what they seem to be, or seem to attempt to be, although they make no practical effort, but just by looking somewhat like hands, by having fingers and thumbs, and having the general shape of a hand, but never being used as a hand, and therefore doing nothing more than seeming like one – which strikes me as an attempt to be a hand, because it is so close to being a hand, whether it desires to be a hand or not, that it appears to want to be a hand, as if the form itself is the truest gauge of intention, although I strongly doubt it, yet it seems that way nonetheless.
It is as if, in those moments when I scurry away from you, feeling myself to be you scurrying away from me, I finally understand what it is to have those hands, which are not hands. I wonder, at those moments, or to be more precise in the aftermath of those moments, whether you have undergone a similar experience, whether you have taken on my hands while I have yours, whether you have suddenly felt yourself to be inside my body, and whether, for the briefest moment, while I am wholly disoriented and therefore incapable of watching over you, you have been able to speak.
The question of your hands is something we cannot depart from, but we will, for now, at least to a certain extent, although they must always be hovering, those hands, over everything, since without them what else?
What else, other than this, since there must be more than this, because without that what is this?
At least they are better than my eyes, which are nearly blind.
But, there again, how can one compare eyes which do not work with hands that are not, strictly speaking, hands?
It appears foolish, but at the same time strikes me as acceptable, and that seems good enough, for now, for me to depart from all this talk of hands or whatever they are, although they may hover, and let them hover for all I care, for I have cast them away with my eyes, which do not work very well, but whose mention at least has this power, so let that be the end of that.
The real question is as follows:
If I am to be you, it seems to me that I am, as a result, in a sense, to embody you, but which you? You have not yet, in truth, been allowed to speak, despite my speaking for you, as you. In truth I speak despite you, as well as for you, and with you, and because of you. In truth you are my speaking, and yet you are dumb, utterly.
For the most part you shuffle from side to side, instead of speaking, which is to say you walk in a strange way, if one could go about calling such a thing, as your gait, a walk. It is more like a dance, but without rhythm, or flow, or balance, or anything resembling the joyful expression of bodily movement. Instead you gait. There is no other way of putting it.
I have considered purchasing footwear, within which you might steady yourself, or seeking podiatric or chiropodic stimulus, in the sense of diagnosis and treatment and healing, or of teaching you to walk differently, given your lack of balance, or disease.
I say these things, I confess, as one might whisper prayers in the face of an abyss, against which we are thrown, so to speak, with little more than our selves, our basic parts, our meager substance, to subsist on. But you are not an abyss, by any means, my dear, or at the very least not merely.
If you are, as they say, enigmatic, a thing to puzzle over, a wound, let’s say, an opening, let’s say, then you are not quite an abyss, but rather an opening into flesh, with its definite tissue, its intimate warmth, its assent by touch.
Because this is the crux of the matter: I have felt your assent.
That is to say, you have said yes to me, but it was a yes, a trust, consisting entirely in touch, in touching your body with my fingers, although it’s true to say you withdrew from me in that touching, but you allowed it nonetheless, even though you were not completely there, since you seemed to take refuge in some other place, some place demonstrably inside you and therefore, I might add, bodily.
You were not there, you said yes to me. This is what I am getting at.
Perhaps you will be able to enlighten me, later on, when you have taken up some form of speaking, when you have become, in a sense, speech itself, of the place into which you withdraw. Is it a place of the past? Or is it a still place – a sanctuary, let’s say, against time, in which things are wholly unfamiliar, as a landscape in a different world, given other predicates, attuned to different sensibilities, like, for instance, a gentler form of gravity, or a porous light.
Perhaps it is a place inside you, and if I am, in fact, to draw you away from it, in a sense, with this language, to give you tools for containing it, and constituting it, and re-constituting it, then it seems to me I am doing something bodily, something concrete, and acquiescence to such a thing can only be given as touch, as I have touched you, and discovered your withdrawal, at the same time as your assent, which is at the very least an assent to something, though it only be my presence there beside you, with my hand on your mouth, covering your lips, that you might speak.
Your lips said yes, without speaking. This is how I’ve interpreted it.
There is a risk involved, undoubtedly, but if you were only there, as you are now, as you read this, then you would understand my response to your lips, as you are now, as I write this.
You are asleep.
Something in the writing of this, while you are asleep, is a digression from the ordinary work I have taken up, of becoming your story, so you might be told it from my mouth, in return, and this digression speaks of something else, something I am not entirely comfortable with in this process.
It is this.
I was leaning over you, earlier, and in a sense conjuring something, something concrete, since the feeling had crept over me quite overwhelmingly the night before, and was being repeated at that moment, earlier today, that I was in need of your touch, and that your touch, your skin, might not be entirely relied upon, and there was something about this idea, which I couldn’t put out of my head, as I lay there in the dark, last night, which I could hardly endure, which threatened to tear away at something, something altogether necessary, the loss of which would leave me utterly disrupted, let’s say catatonic, completely destroyed, erased from existence.
Yet the next day, today, I touched you, and your flesh said yes, or if it wasn’t a complete assent it was at least a partial one, since your flesh said yes to me, yes, I am here, even as you withdrew.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Angelina’s publications include short stories in Muse and AntiTHESIS, an article in VWC Magazine. Three hour book shortlisted for the 2009 Lord Mayor Creative Writing Awards. She is a recipient of the Eleanor Dark Varuna Writing Fellowship and Rosebank Residency. Angelina is a member of the ongoing Novel Writing Masterclass with Antoni Jach, Creative Writing PhD candidate and sessional tutor. Christos Tsiolkas is currently mentoring Angelina with her novel Disobedience.
Sad Clown
Most people have imaginary friends when they’re kids, especially if they’re lonely kids like Christopher Robin. Mine was a wet cement imaginary enemy.
I met Sad Clown when I was in Grade Five.
Sad Clown watched me through the window. His face was an ivory white canvas with huge black holed eyes swallowing me. Sad Clown never listened when I told him to leave. He’d just stand there crying stainless-steel tears that dried into scratches. Sad Clown waited in the bathroom, my bedroom and at the school bench near the drinking taps. He was so quiet no one except for me ever noticed him. His body was long, his shadow swallowed me.
Sad Clown’s clothes remained like a hot air balloon blackening the sun. He had special powers so I could see him with my eyes open and closed. His bent figure had explodable arms and legs dangling from my eyelashes. Other times he stole my concentration by dancing in front of the blackboard where I once answered the question one times one incorrectly. The class laughed. Sad Clown loved the way my face went red and for the rest of the term he continued to laugh for being the dumbest person he’d ever met.
I don’t know why Sad Clown chose me for a friend because I hated him. He followed me everywhere and stunk of egg wet clothes. He used to hug me all the time when I was busy watching The Gummi Bears, The Smurfs, and The Care Bears. Sad Clown left metal splinters in my skin, so I often spent afternoons in front of the TV scratching them out. Sad Clown smiled cause it hurt when Mother covered me in Dettol and Mickey Mouse and Friends bandaids.
When I started high school Sad Clown came with me. He was more excited than I was. From the very first day he sat next to me on the train. Every morning at the station he’d adjust my hair so it covered my face exactly the way he liked. Then he’d tie a string round my neck with a black balloon attached to the other end. Floating above my head everyone knew not to make friends with me.
I used to see Sad Clown everywhere. He was in the mirror at Gran’s house; eating my popcorn at the movies, vomiting on my homework, breaking the numbers on my calculator and always asking me if my school uniform made him look fat. Sad Clown had dark magic powers if he wasn’t next to me he was looking at me through every window or reflecting off every shiny surface.
I was in Year 10 when I stopped sleeping with my clothes on at night. I never wanted to get undressed with Sad Clown in my room so I never changed into my pyjamas and often avoided showering til it felt worse than being naked. To strip I had to steal some of Dad’s five litre red cask wine, skull it, and wait for it to do its thing before undoing my clothes. It didn’t matter how many times I checked the doors were locked even if it was only for a second it was hard to unbutton my own pants and take off my own bra.
At night every night Sad Clown would walk in circles round my bed with family photos in his hand. Mother always blamed me for stealing them from her photo albums. I told her it wasn’t me. She didn’t care she just wanted an image of her family back. She never believed anything I said. Mother always told me it’s not my fault I can’t tell the difference between truth and tales. She said it’s from Dad’s side of the family. Mother could never have her Kodak moments back because with the photos Sad Clown stole, he’d cut out the people he hated and set their faces on fire. My face was always the first to be cut out and burned.
Sad Clown spoke to me in rhyming couplets. He listed all the ways in which the other girls at school were so much better than me. In the bathtub full of cold water I never dared to turn the hot tap water on. One wrong move made all the difference. Sad Clown spent hours echoing my thoughts, going through every painful moment of my day. I tried not to think. I tried not to remember but I couldn’t trick Sad Clown, he had a better memory than I did.
Whenever I went to the shops or the library he came with me. He didn’t want anyone to see me so he’d throw black jellybeans at me and laugh until I dissolved in his shadow.
At home, when no one else was around, Sad Clown locked the bedroom door while he painted my face black and white. There was never any point fighting him, I’d learned very early on it was always better to let him do as he pleased. Inside the highlighter-blue walls I’d scrunch my face closed as Sad Clown rearranged my face til it got lost.
Whenever the phone rang Sad Clown pounced on my hands. Sitting beneath his warning eyes I listened to the phone, hammer by hammer hitting each ring further into my eardrums til the noise couldn’t be beaten in anymore and finally rang out. Sad Clown hated me talking to anyone. Each time the phone rang the cream Telstra handle black, the noise screeched louder in my ears, Sad Clown’s forbidding eyes grew, year by year, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute larger, darker, hungrier he ate all my colours. I watched the red in my veins turn bruise purple-blue and die black before Sad Clown gave me permission to move.
After I got my first period something inside me changed. Everyone said I was a woman and maybe that was what made it easier for me to start pretending Sad Clown didn’t exist. Even though Sad Clown continued to follow me for a few more years after I’d became a lady, there was always a distance between us. It was like an imaginary line had been drawn and it was more powerful than Sad Clown and Uncle Santo put together. I don’t know where this line came from or how I knew it was there cause I couldn’t see it. I don’t even know what colour it was but whatever that line was made of, neither Sad Clown nor Uncle Santo could cross it.
Sad Clown taught me about the safety that lives inside the colour black and silence, the only place to hide in. Sad Clown never said goodbye or made a big deal about leaving when the doctor adjusted her spectacles and handed me my first prescription for making sadness go away. Day by pill-stilted day, month by pill-paralysed month, gradually, Sad Clown stopped watching me through the window. More months went by, I swallowed more pills and stared at the mirror watching Sad Clown and I dissolve together, a little pill-induced further each day, til we both faded and blended into some kind of sleep-world. Once I stopped taking all the different types of medication, I ended up swallowing over the two years,
I began to wake up
Sad Clown doesn’t even breathe in his sleep.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Patrick West has been published in The Penguin Book of the Road (Ed. Delia Falconer, 2008), The Best Australian Stories (Black Inc.) in 2006 and 2008, Southerly, Going Down Swinging, Antipodes, and many other places. Besides being a fiction writer, he is also an academic, essayist, scriptwriter and poet. Patrick is currently a Senior Lecturer in Professional and Creative Writing at Deakin University, Melbourne campus.
Spurned Winged Lover
Someone, somewhere, switched a radio on, switched on a kettle for tea, adjusted the volume, and . . .
“. . . in financial news, the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Martin Gould, announced today that he would be taking early retirement and stepping down from his position at the end of the year. Analysts have been expecting this announcement for some time and market reaction was muted. Interest rates are expected to remain on hold for the eleventh consecutive month after Tuesday’s Bank meeting despite recent strong housing market indicators combined with wages growth and inflationary pressures. Meanwhile, in other news . . .”
. . . somewhere, someone, a woman, switched a radio off. Alice Gander had her books to attend to. ‘Observed this morning’, she wrote in copperplate, ‘a white-fronted tern (non-breeding) cowering half dead on the back lawn. I was able to approach almost to touch it. According to Slater, the species is an accidental visitor, or vagrant, in these parts. Some of the locals have been giving it a hard time. The storm must have blown it in from the ocean.’
Alice sugared her tea. What twitcher could be better blessed? Airy doppelgängers in the mirrored surfaces of Sydney’s skyscrapers aside, the squalls blowing hard off the Pacific met with no obstacles before they gusted into her closely watched garden. How many lost souls, rare fowls borne high over NSW, had dropped on Alice’s doorstep down the years?
Martin’s face still itched from the pan-caking before the media conference. The make-up girl always laid it on too thick, he thought to himself, made him look like—he wasn’t sure what it made him look like (owlish perhaps?). He got up from his office desk. A small mirror hung on the back of the door. But before he could get to it, a sharp knock sounded.
When the Asian crisis hit, and every galah with column inches to fill was screeching for one thing one day, and the very opposite the next, not many on the board had sided with Martin. But Lloyd Collins had. Former blue-chip speculator with the blue eyes, and ambitious as hell underneath, his next birthday was one of those with a zero at the end. His enemy? Time.
“Fronting those press bastards gives anyone a mother of a thirst. A man’s not a camel. Are you up for a beer or several?” The two men drank at The Waterloo after success and after failure. And the bigger the success, or the bigger the failure, the more that they drank.
As he grabbed his jacket from the hook behind the door, Martin suddenly glimpsed himself. Read my lips, he thought: “Not a camel and not an owl.”
Instantly Lloyd swivelled as if a skater on (thin) ice. “Got something to say?”
Martin thought he hadn’t said it, but he had said it. . . .
“No mate, nothing to say.”
The announcement of the tern’s presence could wait until the club meeting on Sunday evening. Alice had a feeling it could do without the ocean for a little while.
It was warm for the last days of autumn. Martin and Lloyd undid the top buttons on their shirts, and tugged slightly at their ties, as they walked to The Waterloo. Jackets were slung over shoulders. Journalists and other financial types were at the bar, mobiles like amulets, and they decided to sit outside—although lunchtime’s news was already stale.
“Beer?”
“Thanks Lloydie. Get one for yourself too.” He could still smile.
Stepping into The Waterloo from the glare was like falling down a coal pit—not that Lloyd had ever been into one of those. He tripped a little on the way to the bar. “Are you next in line?” Lloyd took a second to see who was asking. It was no-one. Just some cub reporter.
“Can’t you see that I am?” A moment passed before he got it. “No comment. Get lost.”
Alice’s town was high on a mountain on the slope facing the sea. The sea, which was out of sight. Population of town: 2 854. Height above sea level in feet: 2 854. The tourists were wrong to think that someone, somewhere, was having them on. The sign was right. And it made the inhabitants feel chuffed, as if somehow they each had special possession of twelve inches of the mountain responsible for a view that reached almost, if not quite, to the ocean.
Lloyd held the frothing glasses high out in front of his chest, like offerings of frankincense, incense or myrrh, as he backed through the door, and once more into the sunlight. One elbow brushed over the sign ‘No Work Boots, Dirty Clothes or Singlets Allowed.’ When it came to getting plastered, Lloyd was the perfect nationalist. Two VBs clattered together.
“Get that down you.”
“Just watch me. I’ll murder it.”
Yellow Caterpillar machines were chomping at the earth on the work site across the road. The clinking of glasses was lost in the roar of machinery. And in the yells above the roar.
Martin gently blew the froth of his beer across the street. Lloyd could never resist a metaphor—in every monthly meeting there was a bit of poetry. “That’s all we’re doing to the economy. Blowing bubbles at it. We need to scare the markets badly before New Year.”
“I’ll make some noises on Wednesday and that’ll be enough” Martin said. (And then: “Can I be straight with you? With Patricia gone my heart’s just not in it anymore.”)
‘Observed a pair of spur-winged plovers feeding by the dam,’ wrote Alice.
Martin thought he had said it, but he hadn’t said it. . . .
“But they’re onto you mate. The proof’s right before your eyes.” He pointed. Two men in white shirts had pulled up across the road. One of them was getting a pair of hard hats from the back seat. Martin jolted into alertness just in time to see the men grinning at each other as they entered the work site. Cigarettes were being offered to the drivers of the Caterpillars.
“Do you really expect me to nudge the rate next week just because I saw a couple of developers handing out smokes on a Friday afternoon? That’s full moon stuff, Lloydie.”
“There are worse reasons,” said Lloyd (who was trying to think of one).
“And much better. Any high school economics student could tell you. I’ll say that we’re monitoring the situation constantly.” (Can’t he hold his horses a bit longer? I’m not gone yet. This bloody politics is exactly why I want to leave.)
That and Patricia’s death, of course—six months, two weeks, one day ago now. . . .
“My shout, Lloydie.”
“You’re a legend.”
The white-fronted tern had finally found the bird-bath and Alice was settled in at her living room window with a pair of binoculars. Its chest was trembling. “I’m sorry you had to end up here like this,” whispered Alice. And although it was only a whisper, and she was fifty feet away behind glass, the bird seemed, for an instant, to cock its head in her direction. Alice shushed herself. A good bird-watcher should appear never to be there at all.
From autumn ending, to summer beginning, Alice watched her white-fronted tern survive in her backyard. One night she woke, as if from a nightmare, with the thought that it had gone back to the ocean. “Why am I so concerned about you?” she said to herself. There had been several further entries in her list of new birds for the area since the tern. Just yesterday, a rare species of wren that you normally didn’t see until you were on the plains far below.
All the members of the local bird observers club had been around to see the famous tern that had rejected the ocean for the terracotta billows of Alice’s bird-bath. Once she’d been a new arrival herself. Each member had added her then, at that first shyly joined twitchers’ excursion, to privately kept lists of exotic creatures encountered. Now she was the club secretary and very good at it too. Sometimes she dreamed of even more lofty promotion. . . .
In the end, Lloyd was it. And that evening he did his best to drink The Waterloo dry.
And summer came to a sudden end, with an out-of-season storm, and just as suddenly, although he could have afforded to live anywhere in the world (Bermuda, Burma or Belgrade) Martin was there in the town, at his first meeting of the local bird observers club.
For he needed new pastimes now. And as a boy he’d kept pigeons once, riding his bike great distances through the suburbs, with the birds snugly in a wooden box with breathing holes, strapped to the rack. They always beat him home, but would sometimes circle for hours, before entering the loft made of packing cases sawed in two, as he watched from the ground. “So who got home first really?” his mother had asked once, pouring a red cordial.
“That’s a wonderful story. But domestic pigeons are a real pest up here,” said the club secretary, as she took down Martin’s details and made up his membership card. It was the first new member in two years. “Gould, you’ve got the right name for our group at least.”
After introductions, there were the reports on fresh sightings and strange behaviour. Martin ventured that he’d seen some magpies while he was driving around town yesterday, looking at houses. They had smiled not unkindly at that.
Finally the president cleared his throat. It was the meeting to elect new officials for the year ahead. “Unlucky you,” whispered Alice to Martin, who was sitting alongside her.
Everyone was happy to continue as they were, except for one, who had a funny feeling about money.
“I’ll do it,” said Martin.
(Lloyd would have loved this.)
“Are there any other nominations?” No-one spoke up. “I therefore declare Martin Gould elected treasurer,” said the president.
“I can show you the ropes if you like,” said the ex-treasurer.
“I’ll manage,” said Martin.
As the meeting drifted into chit-chat about chats over coffee, the president came over.
“Do you mind me asking what you did before retirement?”
“Mr President,” replied Martin (he who had spoken to real presidents in his day) “once upon a time I did very boring things with numbers.” He typed in the air as if at an imaginary keyboard. “Now, tell me more about these binoculars I should be buying.”
“Now he’s one of us,” said Alice, and walked towards the window to gaze at the sea that couldn’t be seen, even on the clearest of days, at 2 854 feet.
The next day, the sign at the entrance to the town still gave the same population figure, but who can doubt that the residents would have walked at least a foot taller, if they had known that the ex-Governor of the Reserve Bank was now living amongst them?
‘It’s funny how little we mean to people up here,’ Martin emailed Lloyd, who didn’t reply.
It was almost a year before Alice worked up the courage to invite Martin to her place to complete some paperwork for the club. “I suggest that we get an ABN but don’t register for GST,” said Martin, as she showed him around her garden. By the bird-bath was a little cross. Having forgotten it was there, Alice gave the cross a casual tap, as if it were only a gardening stake or the like, when she saw that Martin was about to ask something or other.
Of course she knew by now that he used to live in Sydney. “Do you miss the ocean?”
“It’s much better up here. I’m not sure why people are so keen to retire to the coast. Once you get used to the sound of the waves what else is there to do?”
“Our little town is dying. They say the bank is going to close down next year and we’ll have to drive over an hour to do our banking. Don’t they make enough money already?”
“It’s no good, I know,” said Martin.
A honeyeater had alighted above the grave of the white-fronted tern.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing. Martin still didn’t know all the names.
“That’s an eastern spinebill,” she said, and swallowed hard. Soon there were three of them, using the cross as a perch to make dashes across the bird-bath: Father, Son and . . . Alice caught herself before going on with a thought she couldn’t be certain wasn’t blasphemous.
“You’re not happy, Alice, are you?”
“I’m not happy, I’m Alice,” she said, and smiled at the sheer silliness of that.
They shared a pot of tea in her living room with views towards the ocean. Swallows and swifts were silhouettes in the sky whose precise species could not be determined under such conditions. Their darting flights were like thin black cracks along which segments of heaven might suddenly fracture and fall to earth.
Alice wasn’t sure if she was drinking with Martin after success or after failure.
“Would you like another cup? Or perhaps some more of those biscuits?”
“Don’t get up Alice. I’m perfectly content as I am.”
In The Waterloo, so close to the ocean you can almost smell the salt over the scent of beer when the wind blows from the east, Lloyd was drinking with a crew-cutted journalist.
“Do you remember the first time we met?”
“I think I told you to get lost.”
“To be precise, you said ‘No comment. Get lost.’ That was the day Gould said he was going.”
“Thank the lord for that!”
“He stuffed up pretty badly, don’t you think?”
“Off the record?”
“Lloydie. . . .”
“Anyway it was obvious to anyone who knew him. He took his wife’s death pretty badly and made some poor decisions. We’re all still suffering from that. He’s up the bush now.”
The courtship habits of hundreds of birds were no mystery to Alice. On the next club outing, she pointed out to Martin the remains of a nest that had once seen the birth of an oriental cuckoo. The others weren’t interested and had kept going along the winding path.
Should she risk it now? No-one could be closer than two or three turns of the track away.
“I know you’re still in love with Patricia.”
The next moment the sky was full of martins. Martins everywhere. Swarms of martins, cutting the sky into the tiniest of pieces. Surely, surely, it was going to fall now. Her one hope had been pushed over the side of its nest by an impostor. She had seen a cuckoo actually do this—the cruel kindnesses of nature. Alice felt as if her heart were swarming.
He could be firm, Martin, when he needed to be. Quite calmly, he made an echo of his previous question: “What bird is that?” And this time Alice looked where he was looking.
“It’s called a spurned winged lover.”
How foolish, how embarrassing, to have said that. . . .
“Alice, I. . . .”
“I should never have said anything.”
The spur-winged plover took to the air. Now the ex-treasurer of the bird observers club (the woman who felt funny about money) was rushing back with news of an exciting discovery just up ahead.
“It’s a first for us,” she gushed. “Do come and see it.”
“Alright,” said Alice. But there was something she wanted to point out to Martin first.
Broken shells of cuckoo and another species of bird were pressed into the dirt by the edge of the path. But that wasn’t what she wanted to show him.
“The spur-winged plover is really quite unremarkable around here,” she said, and, for now, Martin Gould and Alice Gander each agreed to leave it at that.
Then began a cycle of wild swings and outlandish corrections, predictions of disaster topped by predictions of catastrophe, compensations where none were required and the loss of resolve where resolve was all that anyone had. The numbers told the story but a million wild acres of newsprint made certain no economic hornet’s nest was left unprodded. To fall harder than your neighbour had fallen became almost a badge of honour. People really did end up sweeping Wall Street who once had worked there. People really did just disappear.
“International conditions . . .” Lloyd Collins started, but even he knew that was hopeless, and on TV and radio you could hear the hesitation in his voice as the words spilled from his mouth in increasingly confused combinations. At least, as one journalist put it, the end, when it came, was clean. The Governor of the Reserve Bank fell on his own sword.
As for interest rates? Well, what was Bradman’s test cricket average? “Smart arse,” said Collins, under his breath, at the journalist with the crew cut and the premature baldness. Then, just a fraction louder, “What’s that on your head? The recession you had to have?”
A couple, somewhere, switched a radio on, switched on a kettle for tea, adjusted the volume, and . . .
“. . . in financial news, the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Lloyd Collins, announced today that he would be retiring from his position effective immediately. Analysts have been expecting this announcement for some time. According to the ABC’s chief financial commentator, Ian Peacock, ‘once the tortoise got away the hare was never going to catch up. The Reserve Bank was blowing bubbles into the hurricane.’ Meanwhile, in other news . . .”
. . . somewhere, two people, a happily engaged couple, switched a radio off.
“What will happen to him do you think?” asked Alice.
“I don’t know,” Martin answered, smiling. “Maybe he’ll move in across the road. After all, ex-Governors of the Reserve Bank are quite unremarkable around here.”
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Stephanie Ye (1982) is a Singaporean writer. A graduate of the University of Chicago, she currently works as a journalist. Her poetry and fiction have been published in the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore (qlrs.com).
Cardiff
You change out of your school uniform into street clothes in the Bishan station washroom, then take the MRT to Lavender. Ten stops, one transfer. The east-bound train is packed, people’s folded umbrellas dripping water onto the floor, the seats, other passengers. This train is sponsored by an international bank, advertising the new savings programme it has cooked up for the Singapore market. On the windows are pasted large thought bubbles positioned to seem like they are emanating from the heads of the people seated on the benches that line the walls. “Will we be able to afford a holiday in Europe?” worries an Ah Soh wearing a quixotic amount of makeup on her wilting visage. She has long green fingernails and toenails, like the spikes of some exotic and poisonous creature. “Can I afford to take care of Mum?” ponders a sleeping Bangladeshi worker, whose bulging FairPrice plastic bag swings ponderously between his knees as the train jerks to a halt.
She is already waiting in the open-air carpark next to the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority building, reading a paperback. You pull your foldable umbrella from your backpack, but it turns inside-out in the wind and you’re soaked anyway as you wade across the asphalt, your track shoes going squish, squish, squish. You can see the cover of the book, distorted through the rivulets running down the windscreen, as she lays it on the dashboard. It is one of those chick lit novels done up in violent pink with a large photograph of the author on the back. For a literature teacher, she has terrible taste in novels.
“You’re late,” she greets you as you open the car door and quickly shove yourself in, though not quickly enough to prevent large raindrops from spattering the fake leather upholstery. She twists to rummage through the backseat and tosses you a scratchy scarf-looking thing. You actually have a sports towel in your bag, but you use it anyway. It smells like her.
“If you would pick me up from school, I wouldn’t be late,” you reply. The windscreen wipers thrash to life with a thudding sound. You watch her profile as she puts the car into drive and navigates out of the lot, the way her pupil seems to float in a green lake when viewed from the side. You love to watch her drive. You feel so safe in the warm submarine stillness of the car, a tank against the raging monsoon.
“You know very well that’s out of the question.” She fumbles with the radio, the static crackling into the pushy voice of a DJ, exhorting listeners to call now, call now and you could win… “Did you take a shower?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s not very considerate of you.”
“Sorry. But the guys’ showers are like damn gross lah. There’s gunk and everything. I’m better off not going in there.”
She glances at you, you think to show some interest, then you realise she is checking her blind spot. “Anyway, isn’t it time you stopped playing so much football and started studying?”
“Excuse me, are you trying to tell me I’m a lousy student?” Of course, you know you are not; you are by no means the best, but you’re certainly not the worst either. If anything, you are solidly, consistently OK, which sounds pretty mediocre except that you’re in reputedly the best school in the city-state, meaning you’re at least the average of the best in Singapore. For what that’s worth.
“Of course you’re not lousy.” She slows as the car goes through a huge puddle with a mournful whoosh, blurring the windscreen with fans of water. “But if you’re serious about wanting to go to the UK for uni, you’ll have to do well for your As.”
“Not really. I really only want to go to Cardiff. It’s not that picky.”
“Oh, thank you for holding my alma mater in such high regard.”
“Don’t be so touchy lah.” You can tell she’s not really offended. “I just mean, it’s not, like, Cambridge or something. Anyway, I don’t know anyone else who wants to go there, so I’m sure they’d be happy to take me, the token Singaporean.”
“It’s not just about getting in — you’ll need one of those government scholarships — unless your parents have stumbled upon loads of cash they’d forgotten about? Have you thought about your applications for those? You have to be the cream of the crop to get one, right?”
Of course she’s right and you know she knows and so you don’t answer. You gaze out the window at the dark green rain trees by the roadside, sliding past, their branches like frozen bolts of lightning. It is afternoon, but the storm makes it seem like it is much later, or earlier: a timeless state.
“Then again, you have to ask if it’s really worth it,” she continues. “They pay for four years of uni, but you have to spend six years in the civil service – there’s obviously an imbalance built into that. I’ve always thought that was rather sneaky of them, wooing starry-eyed 18-year-olds with promises of a posh education, then turning them into indentured cubicle monkeys.”
“Better than not getting to study overseas at all.”
“That’s what exchange programmes are for. Besides, half the professors at the local Us are from abroad anyway.” She shrugs. “Even lowly A-level lit teachers like me.” She’s being self-deprecating; they only import ang mohs like her for the top junior colleges, and only for the humanities subjects, the theory being that white people can teach subjects that involve a lot of words better than the locals. Talk about a colonial hangover. But you have to admit, your favourite teachers are white. You find them more interesting to talk to.
Even then, there’s a lot of things she just doesn’t get. Like the whole wanting to go abroad to study thing. An expat like her should understand the need to live someplace else for a while, to just get the hell out of the place you were born. Or maybe that’s not even a consideration for her; maybe she’s just getting paid more to be here. You can’t really blame her like that. But how to explain? You can’t find the words to unravel the knot of emotions suddenly swelling in your chest. This feeling of cosmic and cruel injustice, that of all the random places in all the world to be from, you had to be from here. This place so tiny. Insignificant. Unsophisticated. Hot. Except when it rains.
“I’m just sick of Singapore, I guess,” you finally say. The car has stopped at a red light, and for a while the two of you sit in the burble of an ‘80s power ballad as you watch some unlucky pedestrians pirouette across the road, swaying under umbrellas and open newspapers like high-wire acrobats.
“Cardiff’s not going to be all that different, my dear. I don’t know what romantic notions you’ve got in your head, but it’s very much like Singapore. It’s a city. All cities are essentially alike.”
“Cardiff’s not the same as Singapore,” you say firmly. “It gets seasons.”
“True,” she admits. “I suppose if there’s anything I miss about Cardiff, it’s the change of season. An eternal summer can get quite tedious.”
Summer. You slowly drag a finger across the windowpane, as if you could brush away the raindrops on the other side. Spring, summer, autumn, winter. Otherworldly markers for the passage of time, in a city on the edge of the equator.
***
She books the room for three hours, saying she has to be home for dinner by eight. Back when this all first began, you were a little depressed by the bare-bones efficiency of these rooms – just a bed, a TV, a lamp, an electric kettle, two Boh teabags. The curtains are thick enough to shut out the murky sunlight, but crashes of thunder, the tapping of rain and the blare of horns on Bencoolen Street filter through the glass. It is not a space to stay in for long. But over time you’ve come to see that it is elegant in its economy. All a man needs and nothing more. You kick off your track shoes and take off your wet clothes and hang them to dry on the back of the door, then take a quick shower. When you get out she is watching Channel NewsAsia, the weather report. Rain is general all over South-east Asia.
You are always surprised by how fair she is. It isn’t that pallid fairness that Chinese girls are, a pale yellowness like tea-stained teeth. Her skin is luminous, almost bluish, and completely without any scars or blemishes, as if her girlhood in Cardiff had been free of sports, vaccinations and other mishaps. As you make love, every inch of her body turns from blue to pink, and her green eyes take on a faded, watercolour quality. Even the rain must be softer in Cardiff.
Afterwards, she lies on a towel and continues reading her book while you try to take a nap. Rain usually makes you sleepy, but the drumming on the windowpane seems exceptionally loud, and you end up watching her instead. It still amazes you, being so close to her. You remember that first day when she walked into class, she was wearing a light blue blouse made of some kind of satin and a black form-fitting skirt with heels, not the slutty kind but rather geometric and eye-catching, like high-tech gadgets. Her dark hair was twisted up in a knot and she was wearing a brownish-pink lipstick. Your whole class, both guys and girls, fell dead silent. She is that beautiful.
“For a literature teacher, you have terrible taste in novels,” you say.
She harrumphs, not taking her eyes off the page. “Shut up. Wait till you’ve spent all night marking essays on the Mill on the bloody Floss.”
“Are we that bad, Mrs. Williams?” you ask, reaching out to stroke the back of her thigh.
You feel the impact even before you register that about 400 pages of pulp romance and fashion swaddled in pink have just descended on your head. It hurts, but you know you deserved it and so you don’t move, don’t say anything.
“I told you not to call me that when we’re here,” she says evenly.
Your head throbs to the beating of your heart. You put your hand back on her skin, still warm and slick. You close your eyes. “I’m sorry,” you say. You are, really. But you don’t open your eyes to see if the apology is accepted. Instead, behind your eyelids you fly over the sea and through the sky, punching the turbulent thunderclouds and shrugging off the raindrops, heading for Cardiff.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Michael Sala was born in Holland in 1975, in the town of Bergen Op Zoom, and he grew up moving between Europe and Australia. His autobiographical work, Memory Vertigo, was short-listed for the Vogel/Australian Literary Award in 2007. His work has since then been published in HEAT, Best Australian Stories 2009, Charlotte Wood’s Brothers and Sisters, and Harvest. He is currently working on a novel and short story collection while living and teaching in Newcastle.
Free Style
Richard was busy turning his daughter into a mermaid when he saw two former students walk onto the sand. They’d been a couple for as long as he’d known them, a pair that had latched together early in high school to become a sort of romantic entity. Maybe fixture was a better word. They weren’t holding hands today. He supposed that they were nineteen or twenty by now, yet they seemed older. The boy in particular looked older. It was the way that he carried himself, his gaze locked in heavy glasses, head sagging, as if his chest were collapsing beneath its own weight. His pale upper body looked like something hefted from a shell.
The girl peeled off her dress with both hands to reveal a blue full-piece swimsuit with a white racing stripe down the side, the kind that Richard’s mother might have worn. She dropped the dress and stood there clutching her elbows without even a glance at her companion. Neither of them spoke. Richard couldn’t figure it out. There was no joy in them. What did they have to feel tired about? He had to admit this though; seeing them like that gave him a quiet sense of self-satisfaction. Perhaps it was relief.
Richard was probably no more than ten years older than they were and yet he thought about death often, as if it were just around the corner, as if he were an old man with nothing better to do than wait for its arrival. He didn’t talk about it. But whenever he allowed his mind to stray, the thought of it pulled him down. For all that, right now he felt much younger and healthier than the way these two looked and acted, and you had to be happy about that. You had to take your satisfaction where you could find it.
The couple walked to the edge of the water. Richard hadn’t seen them touch yet. He told himself that as soon as they touched, he would look away. They were hugging their own bodies, standing arm’s length apart, facing the wideness of the sea. The young man was shivering. It was mid-spring, but an icy wind sheared across the cool water. There was no one else at the beach. A reef further out broke the waves so that the swell was gentle as it washed back and forth around their knees.
‘Do I look pretty?’ May said suddenly.
‘I’ve never seen anything more beautiful,’ he replied, glancing back at his daughter.
‘Oh you have,’ she said, ‘I’m sure you have.’
May pressed her lips together and looked down to her hands. Sometimes his daughter would say things like that and it wasn’t her speaking at all, but someone else, and her tone, the look in her eyes, was a stranger’s, although it would shift away almost immediately into her own expressions – or maybe they were his. Maybe the parts that he thought really belonged to her were simply those that came from him. Maybe that was why he kept all of this up.
May had his tanned skin, and the same distant, slightly amused look in her eye that had passed down from Richard’s grandfather to his mother and through him to her. And perhaps she had the same way of thinking? You’re always somewhere else. That was something his wife had used to say to him. Sometimes he wondered if his daughter would eventually come to that conclusion about him too. Maybe she already had. It was hard to tell with a five-year-old. But he tried to bring himself back as often as possible, when he was with her, to be as attentive as a father should be. Not that he ever felt that it was enough.
The wind kicked up, autumn in it already. He looked back out at the water. The young couple were in past their waists. They stood there, staring out to sea, not speaking, hugging themselves. It was as if they stood before a precipice. Richard wanted to see something playful happen between them, a push, laughter, a shivering embrace. Instead, the young man stiffened – Richard wondered if it was at a remark – and began wading out of the water. When the sea had slid away from everything but his ankles and feet, he put his hands on his hips, dropped them again and turned to watch his girlfriend.
She was swimming away from him, freestyle, long, lazy strokes, as if she might go on forever. When she reached the edge of the reef, she found her feet and stood up. Only her head and shoulders and upper arms lifted from the water, but a straightness came into her, or perhaps it was just the angle Richard saw her from, the way the light struck upon the sea. They stood like this for a long time. Richard couldn’t look away. He could see the side of the man’s face, the perplexed, expectant shape of his expression, its nakedness without the glasses. Despite his shivering, the young man did not move out of the water or go deeper into it. His girlfriend dipped her head into the soft debris of waves folding over the edge of the reef and stared at the horizon, her hair dark and slick against her neck.
‘I need some wet sand,’ May said.
Richard looked at her. She was watching him, her upturned palms arranged either side of her body. The tail of the mermaid, sculpted from damp sand, curved away from her narrow, tanned waist.
‘Why?’ he said.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘I can’t get it. I don’t want to ruin my tail.’
‘But why do you need wet sand?’
She pointed at the join between her waist and the tail. ‘For the pattern.’
Richard looked at her for a moment longer.
‘You know,’ he said softly, ‘we came to this beach not long after we found out that you were on the way.’
‘I know, daddy.’
There was something oddly grown-up in her tone. Richard turned back to the sea. The woman was finally wading towards the man who stood there waiting, hands dangling by his hips. The man didn’t break into motion until they were side by side. They exited the water together, but still without touching. He watched them resort silently to their towels.
‘The sand, Daddy.’
‘Wait a second.’
As they drew near, Richard hesitated against the tension in his arms, and held his body low against the sand. He didn’t want to talk to them. He couldn’t remember their names. He didn’t want to feel that weight of high school, the role it demanded, the self-consciousness that came bearing down whenever he spoke to students. No matter how friendly they were, there was always this sense that they had him at a disadvantage, that they knew more about him than he did about them. He tended to feel that way about the whole world.
Once the couple had left the beach, however, he jumped to his feet and ran down to the edge of the water – he wanted to revel in his body all of a sudden, prove its vitality – scooped up a handful of dripping sand, and ran back again. He dropped it into May’s waiting hands, and turned back for more.
‘I don’t need any more,’ she called after him.
Richard nodded, washed his hands and glanced across at a solitary barnacle-covered rock, taller than he was, that rose just where the waves foamed and dissolved into the sand. On an impulse, he ran towards it, leaped up onto a ledge halfway along and then stepped up onto the top. He stared at the wildness of the landscape, the sheer sandstone cliffs, the stretch of the coast that had hardly changed in many thousands of years, the sea. Shading his eyes with one hand, he pictured himself suddenly as someone else, a figure from the far-off past.
Pre-history.
Back then he might have been one of the wise hunting elders of some sort of tribe. That would have been him. He could run fifteen kilometres and swim forever, through summer, through winter. Despite his obsessions over death, he was in the prime of his life. He stood on the rock, flexing his legs and imagined running down a mammoth in some lost, distant epoch, leading a stone-age group of hunters from one success to another, with no long, painful memory to burden him, just the vitality of surviving each day, the pared back immediacy of that sort of life. Yes, it would have suited him.
May was waving to him. He waved back at her and rather than climbing down, jumped from the rock. The place where he jumped looked shallow, but that was an illusion created by the movement of sand through a wave dissolving back into the ocean. Instead of landing on something solid and predictable, he fell into a perplexing space, toppled backwards and hit his head against the rock from which he had jumped.
The blow cracked through his body and a spasm of nausea rolled along his insides. He floated backwards in the water, took a breath, coughed and flailed his arms, but he felt so dazed that he couldn’t find purchase in the sand beneath him and his head went under. Something brushed against his face. It was gentle and feathery and then exploded into a searing agony.
The softness kept moving, ahead of that pain by a fraction, clinging to his mouth and cheeks, fixing to his neck. He knew what it was; a Portuguese man o war, a bluebottle. Richard had seen them stranded in clusters along the edge of the sand. Most of them were so withered and dry that they crackled underfoot. The wind had been blowing them onshore for days.
Discover one of those delicate structures, shrivelled on the beach, and you might mistake it for a jellyfish, but it isn’t. It isn’t even one animal, rather four colonies of creatures locked in a deep, communal embrace. One kind of creature makes up the inflatable sail that deflates to dive from danger or tilts to stay wet, another makes up the digestive organs, another the sexual organs, and the last creature is spread through the dark blue, wandering coils that trail up to fifty metres and cling so tentatively to the skin before releasing their poison.
If Richard had had a choice in that arrangement, he’d have been the sexual organs, without a doubt. Just producing and producing, in the constant buzz of pleasure and creation, lost in the heady state of beginnings, not having to worry about when to submerge or when to dip from side to side. Ah, the sexual organs. He thought of the last time a woman’s vagina had settled across his face and how much he had enjoyed it – little had he known how long it would be before it happened again – and then his fingers found the sandy bottom beneath him and he pushed. His feet came under him and he rose into the air, shirt plastered to his body, pain clamouring inside his skull. He unpeeled the blue cord patterned across his face.
A woman had come to sit on the beach, not far from where his daughter played. She glanced at Richard, and he smiled back. As if this was just what you did. He lurched forward a step, felt heavy in his dripping pants and shirt, picked at the thin thread around his neck, tangled in the bristles of his day old growth, but his fingers were clumsy and his body shivered with the weak, sickly acceptance of the poison feeling its way inside. Flames leaping from his neck, the thread tight on his skin at the throat each time he swallowed.
His wife had been like this, a year past, rope around her neck, something playful in the tangle of the knot, as if you could unravel it with a single pull, her face slack as if it had been carved out of wax, the eyes so empty, you could never make the mistake of seeing anything alive in them. She had been hanging from the rafter in the garage, her body turning towards him when he opened the door. The eyes hadn’t been dead, just empty, like rooms left unfurnished, and it was only then that you realised how much motion there was in a living face, how much tension and complicated push and pull and endless current kept together an expression, even one that hardly moved.
Richard pulled off the last threads, took another step and slumped beside his daughter who was still focused on the intricate lacework that she was scrawling across the firmly packed sand where it cupped her waist. Her hair fluttered in the breeze. There was a faint flush to the skin of her left cheek. She was humming under her breath. The woman nearby was watching.
His heart felt as if it might spill out onto the sand. He had a terrible headache. There was a burn across his mouth. He had the urge to vomit. He ran the towel over the raw welts on his neck and forced himself to hold onto each breath for a few seconds.
‘Daddy?’
He heard May say this, but it felt as if he were listening to an answering machine and a voice that had long since lost its demand for a response.
‘Daddy?’
He ran the towel from one end of his neck to the other, felt the heat, the way it filled his head and chest and made his extremities cold.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Why are you crying?’
He didn’t look at her.
‘Is it because you didn’t want to get wet?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to get wet.’
Her fingers felt cool on his elbow, the tips at the crook of the joint.
‘Don’t worry,’ she assured him. ‘You’ll dry up soon.’
While his daughter sat on the couch watching cartoons, Richard cooked a soup with vegetables and lentils and sausages. No matter what went on in your life, a friend had advised him once, you had to eat, stick to the basic routines. During dinner, May noticed the welts on his face. Sitting beside him at the table, she touched them. He found himself mesmerised by her large blue eyes, the intense concentration in them, as if she were trying to read a story in those marks.
‘What happened?’
‘Bluebottles.’ Richard spoke to May the way he spoke to everyone. ‘At the beach. One got me on the face and the neck too.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I was upset. I didn’t want to talk about it.’
Her hand paused against his mouth. ‘Just because you’re upset, you can still talk, you know.’
‘I know,’ he said.
‘Good. That’s good, Daddy.’
She hadn’t touched the soup yet.
‘What’s up with dinner?’ he asked.
‘Oh you know.’ She picked up her spoon, stared at the soup for a moment longer, and then stirred it desolately. ‘There’s only one thing that I like in this soup. Just one.’
She looked up at him. Richard looked away. May sighed. Her spoon clinked against the bowl. She made a show of dipping her spoon into the soup, sifted through it as if she were panning for gold, then brought it to her lips and emptied its contents into her mouth.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘there are two things in here that I like.’
‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘That’s good.’
Afterwards they sat together in her bed. She read some stories to him, and he read some to her. Then she turned onto her side. He lay down beside her. Their faces were separated by the width of a hand.
‘I get lonely sometimes,’ she said.
‘Yeah? When?’
‘Oh, you know, when I’m in bed. I get lonely in my bed.’
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Me too.’
‘Can I sleep in your bed tonight?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘There are times in your life when you have to sleep by yourself. Besides, you’ve got Rainbow.’
Rainbow was a bright white, over-stuffed rabbit as big as she was. Rainbow took up half the bed.
His daughter nodded, as if she’d expected him to say just that. ‘I’m not tired at all.’
‘Just lie here. Close your eyes. You’ll be asleep before you know it.’
Richard stroked her hair. She began snoring. The sea sighed through her half-open window and he could sense it expanding from the nearby coast, the way it did when evening came, filling up the air, lapping at the houses and old apartments that sprawled along the coastline, creeping inside in dreamy, floating currents of salt that whispered of loss and indifference and those first long gone sparks of life.