Us Boys Made of Smoke by Scott-Patrick Mitchell

February 15, 2020 / mascara / 0 Comments

Scott-Patrick Mitchell (SPM) is a non-binary West Australian poet, writer and spoken word artist. SPM’s work appears in Contemporary Australian Poetry, The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry, Solid Air, Stories of Perth and Going Postal. In 2015, SPM performed THE 24 HOUR PERFORMANCE POEM… which was exactly as it sounds. A mentor to many emerging West Australian poets and recipient of a 2019 KSP Writers Centre First Draft Fellowship, SPM is the coordinator for WA Poets Inc’s Emerging Poets Program.

Us Boys Made of Smoke

When we first kiss, I taste tobacco on your lips: rum-soaked ash, calling. For an ex-smoker, this kiss is dangerous. You are dangerous. But the sandpaper stubble of your chin smooths out the edges of my concerns. I sink into your tongue, lick the inside of my mouth. You turn my breath to smoke.

– Do you want a cigarette?

You ask this question after two months of dating. Two months of nicotine craving. These cravings are just as bad as the ones I have for you, for your kiss, for your nakedness heaving into my skin, into me.

– Yeah… ok. But you’re gonna have to roll it…

In time I learn your perfection of rolling a cigarette with hands too small to hold the volume of my lungs. My rollies are crooked, jagging yellow stains across the interior of the middle and index fingers. They are too tight at the tip, too loose at the base. The butts keep sticking to my lips. They aren’t as smooth as yours.

Like our cigarettes, we too are opposites. You: lithe slender man made of smoke, hair a caramel curl cupping collarbones, eyes so blue I am convinced you have stolen them from a work of art, or some long dead god. Me: scrappy, short, shoulders too broad, black stubble chin matching the buzz cut blackening my crown, eyes dark like a forest of hazel trees, squinting out the sun.

In bed, we are opposites again. My hands are confident. They turn your body into rollie papers succumbing to spit. Your hands have a nervous shake, as if desperate to light up, fumbling with how to keep a match aflame. My body is a flammable material so unfamiliar to you that it takes three months for you to learn how exactly to make me burn. I discover your trigger points in a matter of days, reduce you to sizzle. Then, embers.

Balance comes when you finally take the time to teach me how to roll a cigarette properly. In exchange, I show you the points on my body that ignite under tongue. We learn how to cup our physicality into the other. We are not spoons: we are the whole damn cutlery drawer. How we knife, fork, ladle love. Two cooks, our bed a broth. Smoking after sex.

– What do you mean you don’t know how to cook? you say, surprised at how barren my fridge is.

– I… just never learnt.

– So what do you eat?

– Take out. Cereal. Toast.

You try to teach me recipes you know, but all I learn is that meals are just a precursor to having another cigarette.

– You smoke too much, you say.

I just cough.

Somewhere, in the tendrils between us, an image settles into our lungs: black, sticky, uncomfortable. I want to jab a cigarette into our conversations, burn the skin of our speech, say you brought these back to me. But instead, I just exhale another plume into the room. The furniture is beginning to stink.

Outside of this house, smoking is more illicit, unacceptable. The bars in our town have gotten rid of designated smoking areas, so we smoke out on the street. We smoke in places less safe, more dangerous. Out the front of the bar on James Street is where it happens.

-Ya got a smoke?

The guy asking? He is trouble. Mr I’m-so-sketchy. Mr I-haven’t-had-a-decent-night-sleep-in-a-fortnight kinda trouble. His friend is all hollow cheekbones, rat-tail eyes skittering the sidewalk, looking for cigarette butts, opportunity.

These are the type of boys who would return home, hands blackened with ash, clothes stung with arson, only to tell their mother that no, they have no idea who started the bushfire over at the next farm.

You hand them your pouch of tobacco.

– Yeah thanks…!

The guys laugh. They begin to walk away, your pouch of tobacco in hand, their grins sinister, mocking. The f word is hurled from both their mouths – Molotov cocktails hitting piled sticks – jeered and jeered again at us. Scrappy flames flick up my skin. Anger kindles inside me.

– Oi, give it back! I yell, stomping toward them.

– Or what?! The one holding your pouch snarls, squaring up. What ya gonna do, you fucking faggot!?!

More slurs burn up from their throats – pooftas, cocksuckers, AIDS junkies – and are hurled at us. I allow myself to combust. You see, the rage is always there. Part of you learns to live a moment away from being lit up. These bigots just open the door, allow the fireball to come through, glorious. Consumptive.

I reach for your tobacco pouch. Their ashen hands push me back. I mimic their movement, push the ringleader, hard, then his mate, harder. The fire in their faces is furious. I don’t see their fists swing toward me. But I feel them. I hear them. Blood fills my mouth as my nose cracks. I spit the fluid out, not realising I’m spraying these thugs with my blood. They almost wail, beseech. More fists come.

I take them. Do not buckle.

You don’t come to pull me away. You don’t even shout out in protest. You just shrink inside yourself. Something extinguishes inside of me.

Encroaching sirens scare them off. They scuttle, scurry, run. Like rats. Like vermin.

This is when I buckle, slump to my knees. I can feel all eight punches. You rush toward me, but the blood covering my face, my clothes, it halts you, as though you’ve been conditioned to fear the very thing that makes us pump. Not even your hand reaches out to calm me.

I begin to sob.

The police arrive a minute later. You kneel beside me, put an arm around my shoulder. There is no comfort in this.

In the days that follow, I learn that bruises heal but a broken nose is for life. Especially if you’re on welfare. I flinch under your touch. You don’t meet my gaze. I jump when you enter the room. My anger, undiminished, makes me pull inside myself for warmth. One night, drunk, I extinguish a cigarette on myself while you watch.

– What the…!? You exclaim, panicking, slapping my hand away from doing myself harm.

I just grin. I want you to hit me, again.

In the days that follow, I purposefully antagonise you. You make excuses to stay away, stay at yours, stay on the other end of chat and telephone. You take longer and longer to respond. Our love turns to smoke.

I throw out my cigarettes, my ashtrays, all the paraphernalia of flame you helped me bring back into my life. The burn mark turns to scar. My broken nose becomes familiar. Everything we have created together is unlearned.

The cops never catch those two thugs.

Cat Money by Jane O’Sullivan

December 18, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments

Jane O’Sullivan (@sightlined) is a writer based in Sydney. Her nonfiction has been published in Vault, Art Collector, Art Guide and Ocula. Her short fiction has appeared in Island and was recently highly commended in the Newcastle Short Story Award.””Cat Money” is Highly Commended in the 2018 Wollongong Writers Festival Short Story Prize.

Cat Money

The toddler was still banging on about cat money. “Look,” he demanded, his singsong vowels stretching the word all out of shape. He was up on his toes, clinging to the seat of the kitchen stool, peering right into the cat’s face. “Looklooklooklook.”

And so she looked, just in time to see a paw shoot out and her boy go stiff. Then was a second of shock and then the wailing started, a great klaxon of need. The sound left no room to think about anything else, though she wasn’t too worried, not at first. The cat had a way of firing warning shots, little taps without her claws. But then she saw the blood. “Oh,” she said, in that useless way, with too much shock and not nearly enough comfort. And again. “Oh, honey.”

Then she, too, managed to break the seal of her shock. She dropped the wooden spoon in the pot and knelt, pulling Chester’s body into her chest. He was still rigid with it, the anger and the hurt and the sting of it, but she was stronger. She pulled him in and murmured in his ear, and finally he gave, falling into her like a hot, wet bundle just pulled from the washing machine. She held him tight while the tears rolled down his face and onto her arms.

Slowly, he coughed it out. “Keely…scratch…me.” She nodded, waiting. She was learning to wait. He couldn’t, so she had to. He wasn’t yet big enough to let it sit, to let it all pool until there was enough of it to gather up into a story. It came out as it bubbled up in him. “Keely…me…mummy,” he wailed. She kissed his hair and let him heave it out. She listened to the broken rhythm of his body, the coughs and sobs and hiccups pushing him out of time. “Deep breaths,” she soothed. “Deep breaths.”

But he couldn’t. Of course, he couldn’t. She could only give him her beat to follow, and so she did, rocking and stroking and breathing slow and deep. And she waited, her mind drifting between the sounds of her son and the glub of the oats on the stove.

The cat had come first. They always do.

When they had first come home from the hospital, Ivan had placed the bassinet down on the living room floor with cautious ceremony: There! Home! Straight away, Keely had padded up to investigate. She sniffed it slowly. It was a rented bassinet, and probably came with the smells of countless other people. She worked her way around it and then something had happened—Chester had snuffled in his sleep, or perhaps thrown an arm up—and the cat had flung herself backwards into the air then fled under the couch.

The recrimination lasted for weeks.

Or at least, it had felt like that, when she was up feeding Chester in the middle of the night—all those long, dark hours piling up—and Keely had come to sit on the arm of the couch to watch with reproachful eyes. “What have I done?” she asked the cat one night, her voice breaking under the weight of her exhaustion. What could Keely know about motherhood? She’d been desexed back at the shelter. She’d never seen a kitten. But even then, she seemed to know the answer well enough.

Slowly, Chester’s crying shifted from impulse to habit. She could hear it as she stroked his hair. It was in the suck, she decided. It was in the ragged pull of each new breath into his body. She could tell. He was finding his rhythm again.

The room took on the sepia smell of scalded milk.

She suspected Chester was enjoying his crying now, and the cuddle. He didn’t want to move. She bit her lip. Did she have the heart for it? She did. She stood up, the great mass of him still held to her chest, and tried to set him on his feet. “Let me have a look,” she said.

She took his hand in hers and gently lifted it from his cheek. His face was blotchy and slick and there, travelling along his cheek were two red lines, the blood already hardening into beads. It wasn’t deep. It would be a lesson, wouldn’t it?

How did other people know where these lines were? There were hundreds of them, every day, every kind you could imagine. Some she stepped over, like cracks in the pavement. Others she walked straight into, their spider-silk sticking to her face and catching in her hair like threads of quiet punishment. Oh, what have I done? Did I do it right?

The cat regarded her from the stool, her paws neatly folded back underneath her body and the fur fluffed out over the sides of her collar—that sign of feline disgruntlement. Keely had no time for such questions. What did cats care about consensus?

She gently prised the boy from her legs, just sniffling now, and went to turn off the stove. Because that was what she’d done, wasn’t it? She’d interrupted everything: the porridge, her sleep, her thoughts. Things that she didn’t realise could be broken now lay in pieces around her, and every day was a scramble to gather what she could. Anything she made of herself was an assembly of small moments. It’s possible she’d never been quite whole, but there had been a bulk to her once, a sense of solidity. Now the only thing that seemed to hold was her love.

Chester hung off her legs as she served up the porridge and poured on the milk. It would be too hot for him. She stirred, and the steam rose. On the other side of the kitchen island, Keely tucked her nose down and closed her eyes. Calm settled.

When they’d first got her, they’d let her come and go as she pleased. They’d leave the balcony door open a few inches so she could go sun herself on the rain-blackened square of concrete outside, or even jump down onto the letterbox below and then to cat freedom. And then, when they had to go to work, they locked it, leaving Keely on whichever side she happened to find herself.

Then their neighbour had been robbed. He’d fronted up in his boxer shorts and grabbed a knife from the kitchen sink. He’d ended up in hospital. The burglar, of course, had never been caught. Now their front door had a proper brick of a deadlock, and the sliding door to the balcony had a sawn-off length of broomstick wedged in its track.

Even then, she’d opened it to let Keely out. It seemed important that Keely go be a cat, to prowl and bury her business and eat Indian Mynas. Most nights they locked her in and she circled instead into a comfortable kind of resignation on their doona.

But some evenings she didn’t come back and Keely spent the whole night outside. Chester was still little then. She didn’t have the energy to care. But one night Keely had been attacked and had slid in the next morning dragging a bloody paw and a string of vet bills behind her. It could’ve been any of the dogs. There were enough of them. The block was full of trophy breeds with fat muscled jaws and heavy barks. That was the thing about finding an apartment in Sydney that still accepted pets. It was like stumbling on a rotting carcass in paddock; eventually the smell of it brought out the predators.

Of course, they could have lied to the real estate agents about the cat. Everyone else did. They could have lied and found themselves an apartment where the carpet wasn’t stained, and the lot out front still had grass. But Ivan had a thing about honesty. And work. He was always working so hard. It had seemed sweet to begin with. Now she barely saw him.

Keely’s blood never really came out of the carpet, even though she tried two different kinds of cleaning foam. She’d bought a square of acrylic carpet from the discount shop and put it over the mark by the sliding door. It sat there, a constant reminder of their dwindling bond money, and Keely had become an indoor cat.

Chester took his time with the porridge. She reheated her tea in the microwave and watched him as he spooned it in, his elbows high and wild. When he’d had enough, he stood and picked up his bowl. Leftover milk slopped over the rim and splattered to the floor. He saw it and his little face turned serious. He carried it over to her with such sweet concentration. “Finished,” he said, reaching it out to her. She felt him watching her face and she gave him a grin. “Good job,” she said. “Now you can go and play.” He bounced with the praise, then he swung his little body around and walked straight past the dozing cat on the stool. He stepped over the metal strip that marked the end of the kitchen lino and the start of the living room carpet and she saw him pause to let out a slow, meditative fart. She watched his head roll sideways with the thoughtful pleasure of it, then she went back to the sink. She wiped out the milk-slime and put his bowl on the rack, and turned back to see him settled in the corner, squatting in front of the massive, three-storey toy garage her mother-in-law had bought him. It was a grand gift and an ostentatious gesture: a way of saying move out and buy a proper house. Yes, she understood Ivan’s mother well enough, but it wasn’t that simple.

Over his shoulder, she could see a plastic doll wedged firmly in the middle level of the garage. The sequence of sound effects—the vrooms and crashes and oh no’s—told her how Chester was trying to clear the blockage. She watched his back, then she sighed and gathered up what time she could and turned it into a basket of folded washing and a half a scrubbed toilet.

It was a lot. She’d done well. Her thoughts even had time to float back together and coalesce into something. She sieved the pieces from the morning flowing around her and drifted and worked. It felt good, or as good as it ever could with a bottle of Toilet Duck.

She scrubbed, her hair swinging across her face, until she noticed him standing in the bathroom doorway, watching her. “Cat money,” he said.

She knelt back on her heels, resting the brush on the bowl, and looked at him properly then. “What, honey?”

“Cat money, mummy.” And he held out the little metal disc on Keely’s collar, the leather strap dangling down with a tinkle of the bell.

“Honey, that’s Keely’s,” she said. They weren’t the right words, but they were the only ones she could find. Her hands felt sweaty in the pink gloves.

“Cat money,” he said again.

“Yes,” she said cautiously. They’d had this conversation before. She’d explained it wasn’t real money. She didn’t want to go through it again. Then she felt the line pass under her, the crack of a lie that would no doubt need to be papered over later. “But that’s Keely’s money,” she said. “Where’s Keely, honey?”

He looked at her slowly, then his face crumpled in one of its quicksilver grins. The twin red lines on his face bent and then settled into their curve on his cheek. “My money,” he said. “My money, mummy.”

She cursed herself then. She must have vagued out. She should have been listening. She waited, as though there was still some chance he could explain what was happening. But Chester said nothing. He held the cat’s collar close to his chest and stared at the little brass name plate. Keely, it said, and then gave her mobile number in neat, Italianate numbers. She knew exactly because she was the one who’d had it engraved. What did he even think he could buy with it? Or did he just think it was enough that it was treasure?

Then she remembered Keely. Her unease started to piece itself together. How had he gotten it off her? She peeled the gloves off and stood up, squeezing past her quiet, happy son and into the hall. She felt it immediately: the chill of the spring day reaching out to wind a finger through the curls at the base of her neck. The door was open.

She saw the broomstick lying on the floor.

Oh, she thought. Her same old useless mantra. Oh, oh, oh.

No. She hadn’t realised he could be so clever, or so quick. She saw it then. She saw how he’d lifted the broomstick from its dusty track, flicked the lock and pulled the door open. He’d let the fresh air lure the cat down—the smell of freedom. And then he’d pinned her down.

The two halves of her brain detached then, uncoupling like train carriages in that heinous cartoon Chester liked to watch. They shunted off in different directions—one towards her son and the words she would have to marshal to talk to him about responsibility and pets and not opening that door, okay; the other towards the balcony and its rusted railing. It clattered into the steel and hung there, teetering over the three-metre drop to the letterbox and the dirt and the scrappy little hibiscus bush.

Keely wasn’t there.

She was gone.

She looked up then, into the suburban street she thought she knew so well. It seemed somehow more complicated now. That single straight line broke off into a thousand sudden branches and driveways and dark hollows. No. There was no telling where the cat had gone.

Chester joined her on the balcony then, wrapping his little hands around the powdery, red fretwork. Was it strong enough to hold him? She didn’t know, so her hand found his shoulder and gently eased him back. She looked out into the street and listened to the dogs bark, calling out their dominance over the neighbourhood. It was almost time for his nap.

“Mummy?”

She would come back. Of course. Of course, she would. But the thought wouldn’t settle.

She didn’t want to wait.

She wheeled Chester around and guided him back inside, sliding the door shut and kicking the broomstick back into place. She led him past his bedroom, down to the shoe rack in the hall, and sat him on the floor. She found his shoes, and her own, and the keys. Then she set him back on his feet and reached for his hand again.

She held onto it, warm and wriggling in hers, and she took him with her to look.

ENDS

Artichoke Hearts by Tanya Vavilova

December 18, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments

Tanya Vavilova is an emerging writer preoccupied with liminal spaces and outsider perspectives—by life on the margins. She was recently shortlisted for Overland‘s Neilma Sidney, Overland‘s Fair Australia, Alan Marshall and Katharine Susannah Prichard awards, and commended for the Newcastle, Lane Cove, Stuart Hadow and Feast Festival prizes. ‘Artichoke Hearts’ is the winner of the Wollongong Writers Festival Short Story Prize in 2018. Her debut collection of essays We are Speaking in Code is forthcoming from Brio in 2020.

 Artichoke Hearts

Felix gets off at her usual stop, taps off and takes the stairs two at a time. The sky is the same indigo as her jeans, clouds looking ready to burst.

She crosses the road where the IGA logo glows red and white. The building looks freshly painted, the glass doors Windexed to a perfect sheen.

A woman exits the bottle shop clutching a brown paper bag. Her gaze lingers on Felix. And then she collects herself and strides down the street, a man in a cap following her at a distance of two feet.

Felix takes this all in, before walking through the glass doors of the supermarket.

She heads straight for the canned and pickled goods—the marinated peppers, the jars of olives, artichokes in oil—except they’re gone. Moved someplace else. She picks up a packet of spaghetti from the shelf, puts it down.

It takes three loops to locate the canned goods in aisle 6.

As Felix presents the jar of artichokes to the cashier, the woman smiles at her, but doesn’t say anything.

‘Thank you,’ Felix says.

The woman says nothing.

Snatching the jar, Felix strides through the glass doors.

It’s about to rain. The sky crackles like bacon on a pan. Felix has been a vegetarian for twelve years.

Across the road, the park is small and grim. Felix walks past the empty swings, past the monkey bars, choosing a bench under the fig tree. This is what happens, she thinks, when you tell a customer to lump it: you end up on a park bench in the middle of the day.

No one else is about, even the birds have gone someplace else.

She unscrews the lid of the jar. Her artichokes come all the way from Italy. She’s never been overseas, it doesn’t matter.

She dips her fingers in the marinade, plucks one artichoke, chews it carefully. The marinade drips down her chin. The hearts are slippery, hard to get a purchase on. She plucks another then another and another.

The woman from the bottle shop crosses the road without looking. Her red coat and Doc Martens belong in this city. Her brown paper bag is gone. The man in the cap, too.

The woman cuts across the park, negotiates the bulging tree roots. She pushes her fringe out of her eyes.

The first drops of rain are lazy, languorous.

Felix looks up at the clouds.

And then the woman in the red coat is standing beside her.

‘Can I sit here?’ she asks.

‘If you want.’

Felix considers the jar of artichokes, then the woman’s slender fingers, microbes, disease. ‘Would you like an artichoke?’ she asks.

‘Um, sure.’

The stranger dips her fingers in the oil and comes up with an olive.

Felix is surprised, but says, ‘I guess they’re processed in the same factory.’

‘Are they?’

They pass the jar back and forth. Once or twice their hands brush. Felix feels a tiny jolt each time, ignores it. No one says a word.

A raindrop catches on the woman’s eyelash, refracts the light.

As the rain gets heavier, Felix pushes her hood over her head, but neither woman moves.

‘What happened to the bottle?’

‘Huh?’

‘I saw you come out of the bottle shop. You bought some wine?’

The woman shakes her head. ‘That wasn’t me.’

‘And the man, what happened to the man?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

The woman hugs herself to keep warm.

It rains harder, the drops beating against the tin trashcan. If Felix closes her eyes, she could be back home in Geraldton. Instead, she’s here, in this shallow, mean city. Jobless, friendless, restless.

The rain puddles in their laps.

‘You should have the last one,’ the woman says.

‘You sure?’

‘Have it,’ the woman insists, a hand on Felix’s knee. ‘It’s yours.’

The last heart is sweet and juicy.

And then the woman in the red coat is gathering up her things. ‘Thanks for the artichokes,’ she says. ‘I better be going, but maybe see you tomorrow.’

Felix considers those words. She holds the empty jar and watches the woman disappear into the trees. She thinks of running a hot shower. Turning the heater on. Wrapping herself in blankets. She tucks the jar in her satchel and stands up.

On her way home, she passes the fruit shop and the pub with the go-go dancers. A woman in a yellow raincoat pushes open the door, looks at the sky.

When Felix reaches her block of flats, she sees someone has left the entrance open.

She takes two flights up, patting her pockets for the keys. The stubborn door opens with a groan, lets out a gust of stale air.

Felix strips off her wet clothes, and turns the rusty taps in the shower. Wishes she had a bath.

Her jeans sprawl on the tiles like another pair of legs.

She adds her empty artichoke jar to the stash under the sink. They look nice there, like old friends. The saved marinade is the real treat—for a special occasion.

Felix stands under the showerhead and watches the tiny room fill up with steam.

***

The next day, Felix wakes refreshed. Wonders if she’s made a new friend.

It’s another chilly, drizzly day. Coat and scarf weather. Gloves and beanie.

She buys another jar of artichokes from the smiling but silent cashier. Hopes for a magic olive, like a four-leaf clover. For luck, good fortune.

When she arrives at the park, the woman in the red coat is already there.

‘Hey,’ the woman says, patting the bench.

‘Hey. I’m Felix by the way.’

‘Hannah.’

Felix sits down, puts the jar of artichokes between them. The park is theirs again. No one else is about.

‘Artichoke?’

‘Thanks,’ Hannah says, reaching for the jar. ‘I bought some chips. You eat chips?’

They have a feast.

A grey butcherbird watches them from the fig tree.

Felix wonders if the woman is jobless, but it doesn’t seem right to ask. And then she notices the manicured nails: turquoise.

The only sound is the light rain and the crunch of chips. They are crinkle-cut, chicken. Felix vaguely wonders if she should be eating them—are they vegetarian?—but it doesn’t matter, not really, because she has a friend.

When she looks up, Hannah is studying her profile.

‘You have a nice nose,’ she says.

Felix is shy.

‘I wish a had a nice nose like yours.’

Hannah squeezes her knee.

‘What I wouldn’t give for a nose like that.’

They watch the butcherbird impale a lizard on a stick.

‘That’s nature for you,’ Felix says before plucking another artichoke.

‘Shame there’s no olive today.’

‘Yeah, I was hoping—

A man zig-zags across the park.

It’s the man in the cap.

Felix’s insides spin like a washing machine.

‘Hannah,’ the man booms. ‘Are you coming home?’ He opens a broad, black umbrella, holds it out.

‘Yeah,’ she says, then to Felix, quietly: ‘Another time.’

Felix hopes she means the same time tomorrow. ‘See you,’ she calls, but they are already gone.

The butcherbird looks down from her branch.

***

The next day Felix waits in the park, but Hannah doesn’t show up.

The day after, Felix stays in bed reading comics.

On Thursday, the stars align, and Hannah and Felix sit under the dome of the kids’ slippery slide. The rain batters the hard red and yellow plastic.

‘I missed you the other day,’ Hannah says.

‘Same here.’

Their legs are touching in the cramped space. Pink bubble gum is stuck to the sole of Hannah’s Doc Marten.

They pass the jar of artichokes back and forth.

‘They come from Italy,’ one of them says.

‘Like tomatoes and pasta.’

Hannah touches Felix’s face.

‘You’ve got a little fleck of artichoke there,’ she says, gently brushing it off.

Felix turns pink.

Hannah’s nails are gold today, like the artichokes.

‘There you go, all gone.’

The artichokes are salty, acidic. Texture like paper. They could be eating raffia.

‘$2.99 a jar,’ Felix says, aloud.

‘Bargain.’

Two myna birds play on the swings, like kids.

‘I like your red coat.’

Hannah grins. ‘Ta. It’s a Lisa Ho original, from Vinnies.’

Felix touches the fabric, catches her reflection in the round, metallic buttons.

‘It’s gorgeous,’ she says.

Hannah’s lips are lilac, chapped. She smiles.

The wind changes direction, the rain coming sideways.

Water slaps their cheeks.

‘Another artichoke?’

‘Thanks.’

They keep eating.

Eventually, Hannah says, ‘Dave will be wondering where I am.’

And then she slides feet-first through the blue tunnel, waves and is gone.

They meet up the following day, too. Felix brings artichokes, Hannah a bottle of Sprite. They talk a little, laugh, the fizzy drink makes them burp. And they make a plan.

On the seventh day, Felix drags a shopping buggy to the park. It rattles like a gift.

Hannah waves her over to the fig tree. They share red wine in a silver bladder.

Later they bump along the road with the buggy. And then they’re standing in front of a peeling door.

Felix follows her friend up the stairs.

Their gumboots quack on the lino.

‘Dave’s out,’ Hannah says.

She jiggles the deadbolt. ‘So this is me,’ she says, gesturing to the combined kitchen-dining-living.

‘It’s nice.’

‘Yeah, it’s alright.’

Both women are shivering from the cold and wet. They’d sat in the park for hours, until some kids with sticks came along.

Hannah thinks for a moment, says, ‘should I run us a bath then?’

Felix looks at her shoes. ‘Go on, then.’

‘There are some towels in that closet.’ Hannah points behind her.

The closet is mint green, double doors.

‘It’s lovely,’ Felix says.

‘It’s IKEA.’

As Hannah’s getting the bath ready, Felix wanders in with the towels. ‘Wish I had a bath.’

‘This afternoon, you do.’ Hannah glances behind her. ‘You want to get the buggy?’

Felix wheels it from the front room, down the tiny passage between kitchen and bathroom. She takes the empty jars out lovingly one by one, and lines them up around the bathtub.

‘So why do you save the marinade from the artichokes?’ Hannah asks.

‘I just always have.’

The room starts to fill up with steam.

Felix has been waiting for this moment a long, long time.

The two women kneel in front of the tub and unscrew one jar at a time, pouring the marinade in. Flecks of garlic, chilli, green float in the steaming water.

A petal of artichoke escapes from a jar.

They strip their clothes off, and Hannah tests the water with a toe. ‘Nice and hot,’ she declares, before stepping over the lip.

Felix hugs her chest, slipping in opposite.

‘You’re shy, huh?’ Hannah says. She is taller than Felix and her apricot-breasts sit above the watermark.

Hannah lights a coconut candle, resting it on the edge of the tub. The flame dances and spits. The room smells like a spa and a pickling factory.

‘Is marinade flammable?’ Hannah says.

‘I dunno.’

They laugh at that. How funny if their skin caught fire, then the room caught fire then the flat then the block then the street.

Hannah throws her head back and washes it in the marinade. Her forearms are covered in tiny scars.

‘Come here,’ she says. ‘Let me wash your hair.’

Felix turns clumsily around in the bath. Her back to Hannah, she looks out the window that faces the grey street.

The rain spits at the leaded glass.

As Hanna massages her scalp, Felix feels herself loosen, sink further into the water. Both women smell of vinegar.

Afterwards, Felix half-leans out of the tub, picks something off the floor.

‘Shall we crack one open?’ she asks, holding up a fresh jar.

‘Definitely.’

They chew the artichokes, saying little. Felix rinses her arm in the water. And then their knees bump in the tub, and they giggle. A little water spills over the lip.

Hannah drops a rubber duck in the water, and they watch it navigate the sludge. Felix remembers being bathed with her baby sister, the two of them squealing and splashing, driving their mother wild.

Hannah tops up the hot water. They eat some more artichokes.

Felix works up the courage to ask about Dave.

‘He’s my soulmate,’ Hannah says.

The yellow duck nods in agreement.

Felix remembers the first day they met. ‘Why did you lie about coming out of the bottle shop with Dave?’ she asks.

‘I didn’t want him to get in the way’—she cups the water in her hands, letting it cascade—‘of all of this.’

Felix does not ask any more questions.

They chew quietly, passing the jar between them. And then Hannah dips her hand in the jar, and ‘—an olive!’

‘You found the four-leaf clover!’

They hold it up to the flickering globe, marvel at this message from the gods. This green olive in a jar of artichokes.

‘We should split it,’ Hannah says. ‘I know, come here,’ she says, pulling Felix towards

her. ‘Let’s bite into it at the same time so the good luck can’t escape, you know?’

Felix doesn’t know. ‘Okay,’ she says, bravely.

Hannah positions the olive in Felix’s mouth then leans forward, bites down on her half, their lips and noses touching.

Felix blushes, tingles.

A diamond beetle flies in through the window. Blue-black magic.

At this signal, Hannah nods, and the women tear the olive in half with their teeth.

They are giddy with luck.

The beetle crawls along the soggy bathmat.

Felix wishes she had a whole jar of olives so they could do that again and again and again. She’s never had a friend like Hannah.

When the sky turns red and orange, they decide to get out of the tub but it’s hard to get a purchase on the slippery porcelain. They sink back into the artichoke juice, shrieking, laughing, then they try to stand again, grab onto each other’s arms, sink back, stand, sink, stand, sink, laugh, giggle and grope, until the water cools, and Felix pulls the plug.

My Familia and Other Pigs by Georgia Manuela Delgado, highly commended

December 9, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments

Georgia Manuela Delgado is a writer currently based in Sydney with a Portuguese mother. She recently graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from The University of Sydney.

My Familia and Other Pigs

When I was a child, I could see ghosts. I could hear them too. “What’s your name? What did you die of?” I asked a ghost one day. A nun, in her habit. “A broken heart, child.” This nun I picked up in the convent in the next village. She would get in the car with us and come home with us sometimes on Sundays after church. She would stay with me until I fell asleep. Then she would go back to the convent, that’s always where I would find her again. There were lots of ghosts there, from the convent cemeteria. One ghost died in a fire, she would bake cakes in the convent bakery. She was particularly good at baking Pastel de Nata. She was always offering me cakes, but I could never see them. Her hands were terribly burnt. The other nuns would kiss her hands and sing her ‘O Fatima’. All the ghosts in the convent looked after each other, spoke to each other with kindness. They were so gentle they almost whispered, which is strange for the dead because they’re normally screaming. Once I saw two nuns take off their habits and braid each others hair. Women, alive or dead, will practice the economy of reciprocal care. No institution, not even the church, filled with love and the holy spirit, could instill that in men. But these women, my fantasmas, learnt in life that to survive Salazar, the war, the rape, the suffering, the heat, the beatings, the fires in the mountains, the starving of everyday life in Portugal, the only way to survive all this is other women, and love. They use suffering and turn it into love. Like how women lie in their own blood once a month and still make children from that.

As to be expected, all of the women in my family believed I saw ghosts. These women live in the realm of the dead, death never ends when you live in a dictatorship. That doesn’t mean that they gave me any special attention. Women from our village have to grow up and be strong.  When you work in the hot sun and open your pores to God, she fills them in with cement and hardens you. There’s no time for sentimentality. Even romantic love starts out soft and poetic and quickly becomes a cruel and brutal torment. Love is always unforgiving, especially for women. My mãe always felt unloved and therefore unloved everyone else. I never could understand why my mãe was not like the nuns. She never sang, she never oiled her hair, she never sat in the sun and closed her eyes and daydreamed. She had children to take care of. That included her husband. My mãe had one of her teeth knocked out with a rock in our garden because it turned grey. My great aunt knocked it out for her on a long warm Portuguese night. I remember that night because she put me in my room and closed the door. She didn’t want me to see. I opened the door and peeked anyway, so she hit me really hard with the rock across the face. I was nine.

By the time I was sixteen, I had stopped seeing ghosts. My mãe worked it out of me. I could still see all things I was meant to see, but, more faintly. It lingered because my grandmother would always let me into her rituals. She was a bruxa, a witch. When she knew my grandfather was lying, we would go to the butcher together and buy cow tongue. She would cut it up and ask me to rub salt and olive into it. Then we should cook it into his arroz com polvo and he would eat it. Then my grandmother would ask him his secrets, and he would tell them. This allowed me to keep my connection, to see the things inbetween.

My grandmother would send me to Lisboa once a week, to buy fabrics for her. She sometimes made me clothes, but she made them more for other people. Even now, sometimes people in my village will ask me to come into their homes and admire their curtains or blankets because my grandmother made it. I would wait for the bus in a petticoat my grandmother made me. The bus came when it felt like it, but not everyone buys a ticket. This doesn’t happen all over Portugal, but it does in our village. There’s less and less work and more and more trouble. Nobody speaks to me on the bus, even though I sit at the front near all the old people who love to talk, because I’m scared of the older boys at the back. Today people are talking about the fires in the next village. Someone died yesterday, a little girl, trying to save a picture of the dictator Salazar. The whole family escaped but she ran back in to get the photograph, and she got trapped like a moth in a lampshade. “It’s true, my friend lives in that village. That girl is dead” an old man my grandmother knows says. I think about whether that’s true, or if its propaganda. She definitely died, but not for a picture. The bus is moving but people are standing up, reading over the newspaper. “Oh she was bonita” I hear a woman saying. I can’t see the newspaper so I have to imagine the little girl. I know she already has her ears pierced no matter how old she is. I think of my grandmother who has never had her picture taken and never will. There will be no picture of her in the paper, and not one on her gravestone either. I feel something but I don’t know how to describe that feeling yet. Years later I recall that feeling as bitterness.

On the bus, we pass the best village on the way to Lisboa. Vila Franca Xira. Some neo-realist philosophers live here. Although I have no idea what that means, I know it’s important because an older girl at school told me and her sister studies philosophy in Lisboa. Vila Franca Xira has the biggest and most beautiful bull ring I have ever seen. The entire outside is painted gold. Sometimes people from Lisboa even come here to see bullfights. People in Vila Franca Xira drink coffee at the cafes, but in my village they only drink beer or poncha. I always want to get off the bus and have coffee too, but my mãe would have some ominous punishment awaiting me if I was late. We are stuck in traffic and I’m not sure why, it’s a Tuesday morning. There is no mass on. Sometimes I can feel when something bad is going to happen, although not all the time, just when God decides. It’s because I can see the whispers, because I can see all the things in between. I can see from the bus the Guarda Nacional Republicana soldiers and I know something is wrong. The Guarda Nacional Republicana make me nervous because when they come to our village looking for traitors, they stand in the middle of the sidewalk and make women rub against them to get past. The first time they did that to me I was eleven.

The bus stops at the Guarda wearing berets, even though it’s really hot. Behind them there’s blood splattered all over the gold, like the first time I lost my tooth and dribbled some blood onto my mãe’s gold hoop earring. The blood on the ground reminds me of the first time I got my period in the dirt, but I’m less scared than I was when I got my period. The bus keeps going, and people are gossiping. I don’t remember what they said about it then, I was too anxious to pay attention. By the time I returned from Lisboa that day, the reason had hit my village. A bullfighter had slayed another bullfighter. Machismo merda. The mortician said he couldn’t ply the teeth out of their knuckles with just pliers; they had to pour oil all over their hands first and massage the teeth out. Only years and years later did it come out that they were lovers.

My pai was fighting the fires in Vila Franca Xira that day I saw the blood. The fires were so bad that the firefighters from our village went to help. My pai fought one of the worst fires Vila Franca Xira ever saw at a piggery. The fire surrounded the men and they had no choice but to jump into the piggery waste lagoon and go under as the fire spread over the top of the water. The pigs fried, and the smell was so close to human flesh that the firemen believed they were smelling dead bodies. The men left the piggery convinced they had been underwater with dead children. Most of the men were discharged with what we now would call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but back then was called going luco. In the middle of the night, my pai would wake up to the sound of children screaming, and then he would go into our garden and look for them naked. All the old women on our street talked about my pai going luco. On my way home from school, they would say “Yeah, there she is. Such a beautiful young nina. What will happen to her now that her pai has gone and decided to be fucking luco? Eh?” My grandmother thought it was funny and would laugh at him. She would say “What are they saying when they are screaming? What words do you hear?” She said my pai did not listen properly and they will not go away until he hears them. My mãe never laughed. “You are the man of this house, and ghosts are screaming in your ears at night? Fantasmas that don’t exist? They were porcos. Always porcos.” Is this the spiritual nobility of the peasantry? My pai started drinking poncha every night, to drown the noise. But ghosts don’t ever drown, they learn to swim. The children screamed less and less, and eventually my pai went to work as a labourer. He was still known as luco but someone who had pulled it together for his family. Then one hot day he died in an accident at work, he was completely crushed by a machine. It was so fast that they say he would not have had time to suffer. The night he died was the first night my mãe slept alone since she was nineteen. They were married at seventeen but he spent two years in Angola fighting for the colony.

Years later I fell asleep on the couch in my parents home during a tedious visit filled with remembering emotions suppressed in order to survive my childhood. I never slept on the couch, it was something my father started doing when my mãe kicked him out of their bed. I woke up hearing children screaming. I couldn’t hear what they were saying.