April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Margaret Bradstock has five published books of poetry. The most recent are The Pomelo Tree (which won the Wesley Michel Wright Prize), Coast (2005) and How Like the Past (2009). Other prizes include Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson awards. She was Honorary Visiting Fellow at UNSW from 2000-2010, Asialink writer-in-residence at Peking University in 2003 and co-editor of Five Bells for the Poets Union from 2001-2010. Margaret has edited 11 books of poetry and prose since 1983, including Antipodes, the first anthology of Aboriginal and white responses to “settlement” (forthcoming, Phoenix, 2011). Margaret reads with the performance groups Harbour City Poets and DiVerse, and will be reading at the 2011 Sydney Writers’ Festival.
The Malley tree
‘without Ern Malley there wouldn’t have been any Ned Kelly
– Sidney Nolan
Malley as bushranger, perhaps,
in quilted armour
hijacking poetry,
hoaxing a green landscape.
Verb like bird perches
in the heart of a tree,
the sole Arabian tree,
and lovers stroke the ecstasy
of words
trembling into metaphors
before the shadowed rocks.
Nouns like windmills
flagellate the dusk,
water-tanks are armoured
bushrangers storming the horizon,
Darth Vader breathers,
their blacked-out faces
poets, doomed dreamers, fabrications.
Poet without words
“It is incompleteness that haunts us.”
– Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire.
Lyric is not a category
but a dimension of pain,
a dog barking to the high notes.
Garbage trucks awake you
from pre-dawn nightmare,
long-ago music of garbage-tin lids
mutated through plastic. Three bins,
no music, choose your week carefully,
your cycle of fragmentation.
You dream tidal waves,
the seas control you
emptying one into another.
Working to balance the board, the words,
you end up arse-over.
Same wave, same water,
the wind a perfect north.
Poetry is out there,
news from another front
leaking across the divide,
weeping under doorways,
glaciers once grinding
their way into the valleys.
On the bald hillside,
stripped vertebrae of a Halifax bomber
like an ark or ribbed galleon,
the bodies interred further down
under a cairn of stones,
we trade our lives.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Nicholas YB Wong is the winner of Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition and a nominee for Best of the Net 2010 and Best of Web 2011 Anthology. His poetry is forthcoming in Assaracus: Journal of Gay Poetry, Prime Number Magazine, San Pedro River Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Third Wednesday and the Sentinel Champion Series. He is currently an MFA Candidate at the City University of Hong Kong. Visit him at http://nicholasybwong.weebly.com
Walk With Words
“I never use despair, since it isn’t really mine, only given to me for safekeeping.”
Wislawa Szymborska
Life at 3 A.M. is an elephant
urging me to make choices –
The night chill challenges my social life.
It asks why I commit myself to words
and turn away from humans,
who often talk too much.
Temperature has no speech – it never knows
the setbacks of language.
I have married words. Every night,
I bang on them, wearing my blood red matador’s cape,
working towards perfect orgasms.
Tonight, I am not writing. I walk
in the bituminous street, feeling bitter
after seeing my friends whose life
is made of unpronounceable stock codes.
My feet go numb; my existence, a walnut wafer,
brittle, belittled.
I search in the sky for the mercurial moon –
Not there.
I look back and ask the street how far I will walk
alone
Mark Twain as an Anti-Anti Smoker
Effective January 1, 2007, the vast majority of indoor areas of workplaces and public places, such as restaurants, offices, schools, hospitals, markets, karaokes and bars which are frequented by people of different ages are required to ban smoking.
Hong Kong Smoking (Public Health) Ordinance, cap. 371.
Mark Twain, a heavy smoker
(and literary
figure) himself,
is going to rule our city. And he,
with his humor and flare,
has decided to set free all
underground smokers.
In his inaugural ceremony, he strides
onto the stage,
his forefinger curling
his moustache
when he speaks:
“I won’t bow my head and
confess like a child. I give you all freedom
in an adult style.
To cease smoking is
the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know
because I’ve done it
a thousand times.”
You, who exterminated
that thing
in the city,
must be dismayed
to know the law
is dead.
That law, an infant, which cries no more,
barely knows how to toddle.
That thing –
as you insist calling it –
has a white sinewy-lean body,
a mini-chimney,
paper-smooth, smell of ancient culture. That thing isn’t wood, but it sometimes crackles when lit
in absolute silence.
I’m warning you! That thing is returning
at full speed. And this time,
you’ll say no euphemism. You’ll speak
of its real name
as you do when you name
Jesus, Kwan Yin and the one
rolling over you naked.
During those bleak days, we felt like
fugitives
in the name of the hoary
addictive.
We hid in the darkest corner
in universities, diners,
at rooftops, anywhere so long as
they were invisible on maps,
puff
ing
and breath
ing
at the same time, degraded like dogs which ransacked for food in trash.
Soon we will hang a Mark Twain
flag outside our windows.
His face
soars in proud smoky air,
when we fondle with
that thing
legitimately inside. Soon we will smoke in buses, in churches, in malls, in the City Hall, in museums, in the Coliseum.
You then will die gradually
of second- and third-hand
smoke, and we,
devoted chain smokers,
will die faster. Don’t worry.
Don’t dissuade –
we are all prepared. Everything dies
on a predetermined date,
including the law
you once embraced.
April 24, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ashley Capes teaches Media and English in Victoria. His first collection of poetry, pollen and storm, was published with the assistance of Small Change Press in 2008, and his second collection Stepping Over Seasons was released by Interactive Press in 2009. A haiku chapbook Orion Tips the Saucepan was released by Picaro Press in 2010. Recently his work has been awarded a commendation in the Rosemary Dobson Poetry Prize and in 2009 he won the Ipswich Open Poetry Award with the poem ‘shell.’
old green paint
beneath the bridge
where the busker and his flute
compete with
urine and the yarra,
a school girl drops a coin
into his case
and her friends giggle
down from the bridge
boats are lined up
like water-proofed hawkers,
no better at boasting than
old green paint
on the staircase,
or the predictable swish
of a waitress alfresco
and across the bridge
flinders street station
lies sun-bathing,
fake-tan yellow fading
and the rhythmic
click of the train
becomes the wrist-watch
of a patterned vein.
by the curve
a teacup sits on the sink
shoe-brown
inside, imagined marks
where you held it,
not by the handle
but by the curve, to fit a palm
aching from winter
and the rest of the kitchen
looks a little strained –
ant-killers nest against
the foggy window and
cutlery stands like a palisade
but somehow your teacup
shrugs off pain
with a sweeping shadow
cast low over the dish-rag,
to me it looks like you might
return at any minute.
broom-bristle-dance
beneath sunburnt roof tiles
I try to keep up appearances
broom bristles
dancing on concrete
and scattering leaves
like brown paper bags with legs
my neighbour is doing the same
only he’s hiding an alien family
in the caravan out back too,
I’m sure of it
that, and a wig beneath his fisherman’s
cap, hedge trimmers
and a polite face like a button
or a cuff-link
that night a strange glow
comes from next door, maybe he’s moving them
though it could be just the moon, blazing
away, looking over the shed
in a strangely possessive manner
as if the whole town
were his very own chessboard,
driveways and roads
‘L’ shapes for his knights.
April 20, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Andy Kissane lives in Sydney and writes poetry and fiction. He has published three collections of poetry. Out to Lunch (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009) is shortlisted in the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His first novel, Under the Same Sun (Sceptre, 2000) was shortlisted for the Vision Australia Audio Book of the Year. Poetry prizes include the Red Earth Poetry Award, the Sydney Writers’ Festival Poetry Olympics, the John Shaw Neilson Award, the inaugural Publisher’s Cup Cricket Poetry Award and the BTG-Blue Dog Poetry Reviewing prize. He has taught Creative Writing at four universities, most recently UNSW, (2007-2009). He is currently the recipient of a New Work grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council and is working on a book of short stories and a fourth collection of poetry.
Seeing you again
Driving to your place, I remember
how you said you wanted to carry my hands
around inside your bra. You won’t say that today.
You are married and it’s years since that
dinner dance, foxtrotting under the tablecloth,
my cock wet before I’d eaten the entree.
You said you adored men in dinner suits
and I was eager to strip, loosening
the onyx studs from my ruffle slowly
and carefully, as if they were amulets
with enough power to peel back
my shirt and open up my skin.
You meet me in the driveway, comfortable
in tracksuit and windcheater. Your hair
is not quite the way I remember it.
We don’t have much time alone.
Your husband’s making coffee
in the kitchen as words ripen
on the roof of my mouth like blackberries:
fat icicles ready to fall. My cup wobbles
on its saucer as I recall the last camping trip,
our lilos pushed together, your sleeping bag
zipped into mine, the guttural snores
of lion seals floating up from the beach.
I think of what might have been, waking
to a thousand, thousand dawns, children,
the closeness where you don’t need to speak.
Instead, there’s this afternoon tea, polite
conversation, the way I look at you and wish
I could live more than one life.
Wood becoming Rock
Walking down the steep path to the backyard,
I hold the stump splitter like a baby.
I’m an occasional woodchopper, intent
on clearing the logs left by the previous owners
—an eyesore, abandoned.
One huge tree, an angophora, fell down
of its own accord, unable to get enough purchase
in the rocky hillside, harming neither limb nor property.
I’ve already chopped and moved a mountain
of wood, gradually, like a hot-rodder
restoring a classic car.
But what’s left now is the hard stuff,
wood well on its way to petrification—
green-tinged, adamantine, too heavy
for one man to lift. I swing the axe
up towards the hidden sun and the other bright stars,
then bring it down onto the dumb block.
I make no impression on the weathered wood.
Relentlessly, I search for a fissure in the log,
a crack the width of a hair that I can wedge open.
The longer the search, the greater my enlightenment.
If only I could borrow the Marabunta,
those ferocious army ants from the film,
The Naked Jungle, let them feast on the wood,
then stop right there. But as I remember it,
they don’t stop, eating everything in their path.
I swing and swing until I am a riot of noise, a mob,
a serial woodchopper who won’t cease until he’s felled
the forest. I hack until my shirt sticks to my back.
My shoulders ache, my arms have emigrated,
and I am all axe,
as Gimli is axe to Legolas’s bow.
I can’t work, it seems, without making
some connection to popular culture,
though this is not work, this hefting
is not my bread and butter. Sparks flash
blue and yellow at the moment of impact
and I understand how my ancestors struggled
to make fire. I’m tired, wet, almost done
for the day, but over there,
against the fence lies another
and it will lie there until I come for it—
ageless, slowly rotting, obdurate and silent.
I wield my iron-age tool until the wood wails and shrieks
and when I finally cleave through the stump,
the sound of it splitting fills the cave
of my head with the last rays of sunlight.
April 20, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anis Shivani’s poems appear in Threepenny Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Harvard Review, Poetry Northwest, Fiddlehead, Meanjin, Washington Square, Verse, Stand, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. A debut book of criticism, Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies, will appear in July 2011, and a second collection of short fiction, The Fifth Lash and Other Stories, will appear later in 2011.
The Death of Li Po
Li Yang-ping, preserve my poems. The emperors,
on whose behalf I wandered, are jealous like wives.
To travel a thousand rivers upstream or down, in a
moon’s half cycle, is only to deliver one’s true debts.
In Ch’ang-an, the winehouses gave me a special name
I both abhorred and loved at the same time:
Banished Immortal, meaning he who imagines life
as a continuation of the mountain’s other side.
Long ago, in the gibbons’ shrieks I heard in K’uei-chou,
a passage of sorts was enacted. I lost my strangeness.
Now, on this river that beckons to the civilization
still remnant in the shrunken land, land of half-sight,
I embrace the moon, its diffuse wavy pattern, its
silken bodice, its talkative-silent recital – a poem
inherited among the thousands I most love,
to live through the tough interrogation ahead.
Li Yang-ping, preserve my poems. If I drown,
in the brown depths the poet’s only disguise flutters.
To Orhan Pamuk
You have the hüzün, the melancholy
of undying empires piled on each other,
the intrigue of the word-defying holy,
the torture-games of brother by brother.
You strand the Bosphorus on feet of clay,
an Istanbullu fifty years on the same street,
seeing the Golden Horn as on the first day,
nodding to the names behind the retreat.
We, loud exiles and immigrants, toss-offs
and runaways, our good parents’ heartbreak,
dig for first and last names in the old troughs,
defend to the death our identifying stake.
Your loneliness is spared the daily death.
We, the free, delineate each new breath.
Dear Paul Muldoon
Barricade the America behind the Princeton
oaks, behind the New Yorker’s gates, in a-technical
language of your aged-youth, steeped in the tragedy of
loaves and laughing sciences and lush O’Casey;
barricade it from the striptease of hidden views
familiar from publishing’s megacelebrities touring
the country in birdcages lined with squawk;
barricade America’s broken highways and silenced
cancer wars with ribbons of your faltering
precious dialogue with Heaney and his forefathers
and theirs, buried deep in the potato fields from
whence no man emigrates sans soul in a coffin box;
barricade America whose gift to herself is platitude,
toward blue Eden, soaked with irony,
a flatulent brig staggering onward to foggy coasts
borrowed from other continents, land masses
whose shape resembles fractured skulls.
April 20, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Judith Beveridge is the author of four award-winning books of poetry. Her most recent collection is Storm and Honey published in 2009 and it was awarded the Grace Levin Prize in 2010. She teaches poetry writing at the University of Sydney and is the poetry editor of Meanjin. In 2005 she was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for excellence in literature.
Vulture’s Peak
From Devadatta’s poems
Whenever I come here, I don’t pay much attention
to the lammergeier circling from the peaks overhead,
but I keep an eye out for falling tortoises, elephant’s ribs,
jackal’s jawbones. I stay on the level where the farm
women scythe and rick, scythe and rick, or pick
tithes of yellow samphire near the stones. I don’t
climb to the summit to take in the view of the valley
and the fertile plains; or as the Buddha suggests,
spend time alone in one of the small, damp caves
meditating on suffering and its root causes in desire.
I stay at the base near the talus and inhale the heady
perfume of the lavender and vetch. I watch the farm
women bend and sweat in the sinking madder sun
before they drink and rest near the ponds. I let desire
have its ground. I take my chances under falling bones.
Penance
from Devadatta’s poems
Some nights, when all I do is scheme
to give Siddhattha schism, infighting, dissonance,
when I think of what a pleasure it will be
to give him “dissentry” – then I plan some days
of penance: to lie among wood ticks, crickets,
the breaching heads of worms and leeches,
to let the gall borers gnaw my toes;
to offer the soft flanges around the tops
of my ears to the water fleas and wasps.
I’ll let mosquitos gather and fly off pot-bellied
with my blood. I wont apply saliva
or mud, use any unguents, no paste of cloves
and honey, and though the moon will mock me
like a pointed instrument, like a round
and cooling poultice, I wont give comfort
to any part of my body, but cover myself
with nettles, itch-weed, with crow and turkey feathers,
with hen-house refuse so that mites, too,
can leave me scaled and scabbed.
I wont climb away from my skin
even if worms burrow, or web-spinning flies
hang threads in my beard and make slime.
Though my fingernails will have grown so long,
I’ll not scratch a single bite, or strike any insect
down, but I’ll palp them like strange antennae.
Then I’ll lie on the forest floor among the burrows
of roaches and long-horned stag beetles,
and the sound closest to my ears will be the sound
of army ants devouring everything to pieces.
May 24, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Girl laughing in Rabato, a slum just outside Gonaives, Haiti, Maggie Steber
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Luke Johnson’s stories have been published in HEAT, Going Down Swinging and Island. He is a PhD student at University of Technology, Sydney and has taught creative writing at University of Wollongong. He lives in Mt Keira with his wife and son.
A Near-Death Interruption
So I hanged myself. From the cherrywood bookcase in your study. Where you used a silk cravat and volumes one through to six of The complete works of William Shakespeare, I used a length of rope and three-rung aluminium stepladder. It was not a sexualised thing, mine. That is to say, I was not waxing lyrical with my piece in my hand at the time and there was no pantyhose crotch pulled down to my nostrils or soiled undergarment stuffed into the foyer of my oesophagus. No, it was just a regular morbid suicide attempt, with all of my clothes on and none of anybody else’s. Yours, you old romantic you, was slightly more playful.
Strange word this hanged, before I go any further. Strange both connotatively and syntactically. Connotatively, it insists completion of deed, success of task, it insists death, does it not? But why? I mean, that I persevered where you perished, does this somehow imply I did not hang? Of course I hanged (syntactically the word shows all the deference of a fourteen year old wielding a can of spray-paint). Believe you me I hanged. I felt the lead in my veins rushing to fill my toes, the mercury in my eyeballs swishing side to side like the water inside two precariously-placed fishbowls. Hey, not only did I hang, but I also swung (swing, now there is a teenager who knows how to conjugate respectfully). I swung and hanged as you must have swung and hanged, without rhythm and without breath. Like a starfish. Back and diagonal. Forthways and sideways. A real swinger and hanger, me. A real chip off the old echinodermic block.
After cutting me down, hanged though defiantly alive, they rushed me to A&E, where a white-haired doctor was impatient and cold-handed and an auburn-haired nurse played pretty and flirtatious. Not flirtatious with me so much, I was in no state to reciprocate her winks and pouts anyway, but with the ambulance driver who had brought me in certainly. The two of them waited for the doctor to finish his examination, then together they lifted me off the ambulance gurney and onto another bed with wheels. ‘He must have pissed himself after he passed out,’ the debonair driver whispered intimately while she his silver-time-piece-chested lover took count of my pulse and wiggled her button nose. Oh it was sweet being at the centre of their lovesick innuendos, and I must say, father, the smell of my soiled woollen trousers did not embarrass or cause me any special concern, not after seeing what you did to the back seat of those fishnet stockings, you old dog.
After only a short period of lying around like this mother arrived at the hospital. You remember mother, right?
‘You tried to hang yourself?!’ Part question, part exclamation. As difficult to separate as the Catholicism and Spanishness. If forced I should guess the exclamation portion of it belonged mostly to tried and Spain, and the question portion mostly to Jesus and hang.
‘Is that what they have told you?’ I replied coolly. This, after all, was a public hospital in Taunton, father, and no place for me to be acting all sulky now, not in front of such noble creatures as this nurse and her driver, working on a pittance as I am sure they were. ‘Well, okay, if that is what they have told you then. Did they mention the bit about me pissing myself also?’ I could see the hurt in mother’s eyes and wanted to let the ink run. Oh, the magnificent blueness of it.
‘Is this the kind of boy I have raised?’ she responded quietly, putting her hands to her chest to fondle that cleavage-stricken Christ of hers as she was prone to doing in times of distress, like some clean-necked virgin fending off a house of vampires with nothing but her clever little talisman. ‘The kind who would try such a thing as this? To hang himself? Hang himself!’ With the second hang she turned away from me and tugged down on the Christ with such force its silver chain could only sharpen the briefest line across the back of her neck before snapping clean in half. For a moment I though she might have been weeping. Then she swung back to face me, still clutching in her tight little fist that miniature figure who would not have looked out of place between the letters S and U. ‘Not to mention poor Marcella. Tell me you are not so selfish you would attempt such a thing.’
I was impervious. ‘Must we go on about Marcella?’ I yawned. ‘The woman really should start knocking before entering a room. The sound of a knot tightening around a neck must ring in her ears like some kind of high-pitched dog whistle.’
Mother moved to slap me but stopped herself. ‘You would mock your father like this?’ she scolded beneath her breath. ‘Talking about his accident like some funny joke. In front of any-old person.’
‘Yes, father’s accident.’ I looked past mother and at the nurse, who in turn looked past me and at the driver. She may have even winked to him: code of course, for, How about a handjob in the janitor’s, my love? The two of them left the room hurriedly then and it was just mother and I. Allowing the sarcasm to inflect my voice with its nasally undertones and offbeat emphases, I continued. ‘That accidental morning in accidental August. What an accidental shame it was.’
This time mother’s hand connected well with my cheek, the Christ getting his own piece of the retribution too. ‘That you would even dream.’ The jolt of the slap frightened me only half as much as it frightened her, I think. You must remember, father, this is the woman who used to eroticise me into syrupy slumbers by smearing her own areolas with honey, her little Alberry and custard dumpling—just look at him suck himself to sleep! And now, thirty-seven years on, showing more concern for the fragile disposition of the cleaner than for her own lacteal kin—what heartbreak!
I touched the stung spot with the back of my hand. ‘Yes, poor Marcella and her poor sweet cleaner lady’s life. And poor father too. Poor you and poor me, while I am at it. And rest assured, mother, none of it is true.’ Lies, lies, lies. ‘They have confused me for one of the other boys on the ward. Hang myself? I was only trying to gratify myself sexually. I swear it. It is a Briton’s pastime. I will show you the rope burn on my penis if you do not believe me. A boy like me getting mixed up in a thing like suicide! Even when Laudie left me, even then I did not contemplate putting a noose around my neck for the purpose of killing myself. Not to mention death being the most thorough talent scout there is, mother. If I had shown potential for a thing like suicide, then believe you me, death would have sniffed me out at a very early age, set me up for life, scholarship and all. No this is just a case of pushing the boundaries of perversion too far. The apple and the tree and all that proximity talk. Oh, please do apologise to Marcella for me. What a dreadful mix-up.’
Mother looked at me, studied me. And then she huffed. And then she left the room. And smiling, I went to sleep.
An hour or so later I awakened to find in mother’s place a woman whose makeup promised to outlast her face, whose foundation alone seemed heavy enough to negatively preserve her features for at least another three hundred years, to a time when Western Europe’s frescos will be dissolved into camera-flash oblivion and the gothic clocks of Bavaria cried for like the felled trees of fictitious Amazonia. And in place of my woollen trousers, father, complementing the shift from mother’s moody toddler to psychiatrist’s prized patient quite well, I think, a sort of plastic-legged skirt with these built-in elastic-legged pantaloon thingies.
‘Your admission card says Albert,’ Tutankhamen’s lovechild insisted. I do not remember for how long we had been arguing the point. Though I do recall that at one juncture she even went so far as to show me where the name had been filled in: Albert Dean Childes, silent s and all.
‘It is an error,’ I explained to her.
‘Not according to your mother, Albert.’
‘According to my mother my uncle is the rightful king of Denmark. Who are you going to believe?’
‘Do you think this kind of talk impresses me, Albert?’
‘Hamlet,’ I corrected her. She said nothing. I went on. ‘No, I do not suppose so. Would you be more impressed if I told you the real king of Denmark wore ladies’ stockings and used lipstick in place of Vaseline?’
She stood up and moved her chair slightly closer to me. Or perhaps she did not move it any closer at all, but rather just stood up and sat down again to give the impression of having moved closer. Either way, I found myself near enough to identify each swamped hair follicle now. Her eyelashes looked like they had endured the most recent Exxon disaster. Her upper lip was a Puerto Rican mudslide.
‘I know all about what happened to your father, Albert.’ She seemed to be whispering at me.
‘You like to remind people of their names, don’t you, doctor?’ I deepened my voice, doing my best to match her gravity.
‘Now, I never said I was a doctor, Albert. If you must know I hold an Honours degree from the University of Warwick and a Masters from Somerset.’
I frowned. Felt played. Found myself yearning for mother who wore her heart and diploma on her sleeve.
‘Albert, you are not expected to be unmoved by what happened to your father.’ She put her hand on the bed, next to my shoulder, to assure me some. She seemed to know you so well, father, know all of your moves. What if she had leaned forward next and rubbed her cleanly-shaven chin against my forehead, to kiss me good night? Would I have begun sucking my thumb and wet myself a third time?
‘Unmoved, why of course not,’ I said to her. And to some degree, meant it too. It was after all quite a shock to us, father, to learn of the promiscuous double life you had invented for yourself. When we found you, the tip of your penis was squeezed out through the top end of your fist like a tongue between two pursed lips, and the pearly sequins on the fronts of your stiletto heels shone up at us like droplets of you-know-what. And whatever shade of lipstick that was, smeared around the edges of that makeshift orifice, well, mother has refrained from restocking her supply—from wearing lipstick altogether in fact. The poor woman, since your death her lips have taken the semblance of a pair of mating slugs just doused in salt. You know what else, father? I cannot help but wonder whether the whole scene was not staged for mother’s benefit in the first place, aimed at notifying her of some sexual underperformance on her part. That you went so far as to make a face of your fist. Nothing subtle about that. Tell me I am not on to something.
‘It must have been very distressing. Your mother tells me it was your aunt who discovered him.’
‘It is an affectation,’ I said to the Master of Psychology graduate with her hand upon the mattress beside my left shoulder. ‘Marcella is not really my aunt. Just a cleaner.’
‘She seems to care for you a great deal. She was here earlier while you were sleeping.’
‘Did she try to tip anything in my ear? That is how she did father, you know? She has been with us a very long time, but is completely untrustworthy.’
‘Your mother tells me you were homeschooled, Albert.’
I nodded. Silently. I did not dare speak in fear of divulging information on the chivalrous suicide vow I had made to an already-spoken-for Beatrice during our grade-three reading of La Vita Nova, father. Sure evidence of my long-term psychological state.
Continuing unprompted, ‘Your father was in charge of your education? Or your mother?’
‘My father taught me the humanities and sciences, and my mother the guidelines for a healthy soul. Neither was in charge. A person’s education is his own charge.’ I was churning it out now.
‘And your father was a professor too. At Somerset. I remember him from one of my own classes, would you believe?’
‘Some kind of professor, yes.’
‘A very clever man.’
‘With an ear for trouble.’
‘Hmm,’ she said. Then, ‘I would like permission to speak with your wife, Albert.’
‘My wife is deceased,’ I told my interrogator.
‘That is not what your mother has told me.’
‘My mother was in charge of discipline, if that is what you mean by in charge. Though she was a forgiving disciplinarian. If father sent me to her for corporal punishment, then she would close the door and beat on a cushion and I would moan in time with each stroke. She stopped smearing honey on her teats when I was two.’
‘We are talking about your wife now, Albert.’
‘Is it important?’
‘Very.’
‘Yes, poor Laudie,’ I said. ‘She drowned in a terrible house fire, you know. It makes me too sad to mention. Sorry I cannot be of more help. I have long suspected her brother of foul play. A chap with washboard abdominals.’
She gave me a stern smile. Her nose might have fallen to ruins along with a swag of other famous decayed noses, led of course by the Sphinx (the answer is man! I thought to yell). ‘Okay, Albert, I will visit you again later this evening. We must talk seriously before I can allow you to leave. It is necessary for my report. You see me carrying my reports, don’t you?’
‘I see nothing I am not supposed to see.’
But that was not entirely true either, father. From my bed beside the window I could see the advertisement for the cheap carpet warehouse pasted on the back of the bus shelter down below. Some stand-in with a cartoonish face who had been paid to put on a pair of tights and pose himself in a manner befitting the tagline To carpet or not to carpet? That is the question. You will agree, father, it is a disgrace the way they exploit the classics like that.
