This piece was written in 2008. It is a monologue, designed to be read aloud by a single performer. It's loosely set at a similar time to a previous story of mine, 'the fairytale is dead', but the subject matter is quite different.
A Boy on a Bus
A monologue
DAN is sitting on a chair. He’s wearing a hoodie and is holding a travel guide.
Dan: It smells here.
Like… lamb. Boiled lamb.
Boiled lamb and communism. This whole country smells like boiled lamb and communism. It gets right into your nostrils. Seeps into your skin. You feel…sluggish. Like you’re wading through the congealed jelly stuff you get on cooked sausages when you put them in the fridge. The air is thick with it, you sweat fat.
Beat
I thought a shower would help, no shower head, so I try the bath. The water is the same thick, like gravy. The whole place is a vegetarian’s nightmare. So here I am, this big hunk of sweaty lamb, lying in a bathtub full of thick gravy water, trying not to breathe in through my nose. And I’m trying to shake this hangover. I flew in last night. By the time I got here I’d sobered up and the memory of my last night in Madrid was hazy. I stank – even before the lamb – and every time I caught a whiff of my clothes, of the stale cigarette smoke and spilt beer, I wanted to be sick, so the bath, the gravy boat bath, was really a necessity if I was going to survive the next 24 hours.
After the cleaning, and after finding a t-shirt that didn’t smell like the apocalypse, and after dousing myself in enough generic Spanish deodorant to give myself a headspin, I decide to check out the bar, the ‘communal area’ the website said was a much loved feature of this charming home away from home. The bar turns out to be a fold-up table and two fold-up chairs, one of which is permanently occupied by a stuffed cat. For a second I consider going back to my dorm and getting high on the rest of my deodorant. But then I think – ‘No. Not today. Today, you’re going to do something’.
I have a beer to settle my stomach and, in the absence of any other English-speakers, I have a browse through one of the guide books that mum thrust into my hand back at the airport, when I was leaving Melbourne. I told her I didn’t need them, that I was just going to feel my way through the continent. I don’t need the help of some geriatric whose number one suggestion for entertainment in Madrid is a jazz bar called “Jazz Bar Madrid”. I would rely on secrets passed from one weary traveller to the next, whispered over a lager in dingy hostel bars. Except that hasn’t really happened yet.
There’s this bit at the back, “only staying for a short time? Try one of these fun-filled day trips!”
Beat
I could do that.
Beat
This is my second-to-last stop before I go home and I am determined to see something old. Engage with something old. According to this, there’s an old castle somewhere, of on top of a hill. It’s haunted, it’s only a couple of hours out of town, there’s a museum there. I need this, I need to be able to show my parents some photos from this trip. Because, I’m searching through my camera and it’s not pretty. It’s like someone pinched the fucker and took it on a Contiki tour through Europe. It’s just beer and bars and boobs and more beer, in a different bar, oh look there I am drunk in Spain, drunk in Paris, drunk in the Swiss Alps, have I even been to Switzerland? This isn’t a holiday, it’s a write-off.
“Built on a rocky outcrop in the early part of the 15th century, this once grand castle is now in disrepair. Local legend has it that it’s haunted by the ghosts of the town’s dead. But don’t let that put you off! Spend an afternoon taking in the gorgeous sights and sounds of this remote and oft forgotten gem. While rich with history and culture, don’t forget to take some time out for yourself – ladies, pick up some souvenirs from the many markets in town, and gents, you unwind in the old-style Croatian bar built out over the water.” Perfect. Two birds, one stone.
I get on the bus going to this castle, and I’m psyched. I’m not sure it’s the right bus but, I figure, how lost can I get? I’m a tourist, for god’s sake, we don’t get lost, we have experiences. The bus driver charges me 3 of whatever currency I’m using now. 3 units for an 80-year-old bus doing 150km/h. Bargain. I’ve got a little day-pack, some lunch, and my sunscreen and a hat and my iPod and a book. I don’t think I’ve ever been this resourceful in my life. Except there was one day in London where I woke– I think it was London. I woke up feeling a little worse for – No, I think it was Germany, actually, Berlin. Yep. I was a little worse for wear so I thought – no, you know what, it was Portugal, and we’d been drinking Grey Goose because when I had Maccas later that afternoon, I chucked in the toilets and I remember tasting vodka. So I don’t think I’ve ever been this resourceful, except for this time in Portugal where I woke up and was feeling a little worse for wear and went to have a bath, and there was no plug, but somehow I thought to use the lid of my jar of hair gel as a plug, and kind of suctioned it onto the drain and it just stuck there. That was pretty resourceful. Except then I vomited in the bath and I couldn’t get the lid off because it was stuck on too tight.
I sit by the window because I want to see out, I want to see what this country looks like. It looks a lot like the French countryside actually. And the Austrian countryside, and the German countryside. In an attempt to resist boredom, I stick on my headphones and flick my hoodie up … but before I know it I’ve fallen asleep.
I wake up about forty-five minutes later. I wake up because I can feel something rustling against my legs, and my first thought, before I even open my eyes, is to pull my bag close to my chest and say a small prayer. Not a prayer, as such, but something like a prayer, a sort of wish. Please, always ask nicely, please let this turn out well. When I open my eyes, expecting the worst – expecting a knife, or a twisted smile or, at the very least, a dude in a trench coat – it’s not that bad at all. I open my eyes and instead of a murderer or a pervert or a robber, its just this old guy, smiling. He’s probably about 65, Polish or something, has a heavy accent, a cleft palette and no teeth so I can’t really understand most of what he’s saying. He pulls out a little photo album and is talking at a million miles an hour and I just start nodding, and then he starts flicking through his photos. While I struggle to understand why this man I don’t know would wake me up to show me photos of other people I don’t know, he’s just rabbiting on and pointing at his pictures. He’s pointing at a picture of a house, and then of a tree, and then of a field, and a cow, and another cow, and another cow, and then of a barn, and then of that same barn on fire. He keeps flicking through the pictures and pointing and muttering something about each of them, and I keep nodding, and then he stops.
Pause, and then softer
He stops on a picture that looks a lot like most of the other pictures, just craggy countryside and broken buildings. But then I see the little black ball on the ground, the mangy little puppy dog sleeping on a rock with his little puppy eyes closed tight against the wind. The old man doesn’t say anything for a minute, just looks at the picture, and there’s silence between us.
I wait for him to speak.
He doesn’t.
His eyes are clear and bright. And then he turns the page and there’s another barn with its roof on fire.
He runs out of photos eventually. He doesn’t stop talking, though. He shows me a scar on his arm, an accident involving a goat. I think. I show him a scar on my eyebrow from when Lachlan Kibbell smacked me in the head with a Transformer when I was seven. He tells me about his daughter, she’s a vet. I tell him my sister’s a bitch. He points at my camera. I feel a little embarrassed clicking through my photos for him. He probably thinks I’m an idiot. Or an alcoholic. He grins at all the ones of me spreading my arms wide, pulling dumb faces in front of a big monument – “Dickhead in front of Eiffel Tower/Leaning Tower/Tower Bridge”. He laughs at me straddling a giant lion somewhere in Paris, and tells me a story about himself, cooking pasta on a camping oven in the Parisian metro in 1975 with a bunch of other lost souls. Yesterday’s McChicken suddenly repeats on me.
An hour later the old man gets off. We’ve been talking the whole time, and I didn’t even realise how far we’d gone. I’m almost at my stop, too. He stands up and pats me on the shoulder and insists I’m a good boy and he smiles at me once more before heading off down the aisle. I yell out to him and he comes back and I ask him if he wouldn’t mind doing me a favour.
I never get to the castle. Never get to see the museum. After my barn-loving friend leaves we head into the mountains. Windy little roads with paddocks on one side and cliff-faces on the other. We come over the top of a small rise and for a second I can see a sign, a ‘Welcome to…’ sort of sign. And then this old man runs in front of the bus. He’s being chased by a rabid dog, a mangy little thing with matted fur and grey whiskers, it chases him right in front of us. So we swerve, of course. We don’t want to hit him. Except we do hit him, and then we hit this tree. And then we go through the tree and through the metal road barrier, and the bus does this pathetic little tumble, kind of trips over the edge of the cliff and bumps its head on a rock, and then we roll. The woman in front of me dives on top of her kids, but as we roll, she kind of misses them, and they get lost amongst smoke and bags and other bodies. I’ve got my camera in my hand still, and what I’m scared of – what I’m scared¬ of, right now, is breaking it. I kind of fumble to shove it under my hoodie, but because I let go of the seat I get thrown head first into the wall, so I end up arse over head with a snapped neck. The windows all smash and there’s glass everywhere. There’s screaming, a lot of it. You can’t see for dust and smoke. The woman in front is waving her arms madly, still blindly reaching for her kids, but we’re all being tossed around like little chunks of meat, flesh ripping open, a veritable salad of bus crash victims. We keep rolling and when we finally hit the bottom, we land on a big old barn. We crash right through it’s roof and the whole bus bursts into flames.
The dog runs over to the edge of the cliff and he looks out at all this. The old man’s body is still on the side of the road, and the dog sniffs it once, twice. And then he does a little turn, wees on a patch of grass, and runs off in the direction of the hills.
When my remains and personal effects are delivered to mum and dad, it takes them a while to get to my photos. Marc’s the first one to suggest pulling the flash card out of my mangled camera and trying it on another. They flick through all the photos from the bars, with the beers and the boobs, and they have a bit of a giggle. Crazy kids and their crazy adventures. I’m sad there’s not one they can, y’know, frame. One where I’m not holding a drink or a cigarette. Dad takes the dogs for a walk. I’ve got like 600 photos or something, and my mum stays up into the night clicking through each one really slowly. Through Paris, through London, Scotland, Barcelona, Madrid. And then she gets to Croatia. To the last picture I ever took.
She looks at the photo. And then she starts laughing. Because it’s the first photo where I’m not pulling some face, where my eyes aren’t blurry, my arms aren’t pumped up about my head, I’m not posing.
It’s just … a couple of smiles.
She stops. She stops and it’s 4am. She turns the camera off, and pulls out the little flash card, this little blue chip, and she wraps it in my t-shirt, the one I was wearing when I died, and it’s all charred and dirty. She wraps it in the t-shirt, and slips it under her pillow. And then she goes to bed.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
from the dark end of the street.
This piece was written in 2008. It is a character exercise, and the story is loosely based on a play that I co-wrote in 2007.
From the Dark End of the Street
Mary knew it had been too long. Her belly had grown out so far she couldn’t see her feet anymore. Not that she liked her feet. She hated the way her gnarled toes stuck at out odd angles. She used to sit on the roof of the car and pick at her toenails with a bit of broken mirror, wedging the corner in between the nail and her flesh, scraping the dirt away. She preferred being clean. All of the girls had different approaches. Some liked to be dirty, thought it made them blend in more. Mary was beginning to blend in now. If she stood still for long enough she thought maybe she could feel the moss creep up from the rocks and crawl in between her toes. Maybe. Everything grew fast here.
“Can you hear me in there, baby? I promise. Soon enough, baby. I promise.”
She leaned against the bonnet of the car, one hand supporting her weight, the other firmly on her swollen and distended belly. It stayed there a lot now, patting, or rubbing. She liked to feel the heat that radiated through the rough fabric of the smock under her hand. Judah had cut it for her, stitched it together with string and laces. It was made from scraps of brown and green, an old tablecloth, a birthing blanket. She sewed a bra in to the front and hid the stitches with more fabric. Her special baby dress. It was nearly worn through after all these years.
Standing where she was, in the centre of the junkyard, her view of the fields below was obscured by a great wall of impenetrable bushland, strong trees guarding over her. On either side, two great wings of junk hugged the perimeter. Ovens and washing machines, black with rust; bookshelves mouldy and damp, eaten alive by the termites that relocated after they destroyed part of the barn years earlier. The once great fruit trees that hung low over the top of her, the trees in which she had played, in which her boys had played, were reduced to skinny and brittle fruitless fingers, drooping down and tickling the heads of all who walked under them. The smell of rotting fruit hung over the car, apple and pear cores melting into the earth around her feet. Ants scurried across her toes, burying themselves in among the moist dead leaves. The ground was seething with life, buried under years of debris.
She moved her feet, feeling the sticky, damp earth between her toes. Something stabbed at her flesh, and she squatted down to see what it was. Buried under a rotting pear, in a small depression covered with fresh compost, was a small bone. Two bones, three. More. A hundred tiny bones caked with dirt. A hundred tiny bones in formation. Her heart leapt. She brushed away some earth. A wing. A bird’s wing. Then the body of the bird, hastily buried, feathers sticking to the rotting flesh, squirming maggots feasting on what was left. Her toe was bleeding now, the blood dark against her skin.
The last of the day’s warmth was slipping behind the trees and night began to settle. Mary’s eyes, sinking away into their sockets, felt heavy with sleep. But she would stay awake, at least until Judah came. It was different this time, but she always turned up. Eventually.
She stopped. A noise. Footsteps coming up the hill behind her. Alex. She knew that Jim had sent him, that the men would be looking for her, but she liked the air up here. She could breathe. She looked up at the nearly full moon and her heart rate quickened. At least, she thought it was her heart. She’d first felt the baby’s heartbeat at four months, a dull knocking inside her. At eleven months it was almost in sync with hers, out by just enough to reassure her it was still there. She pressed her fingers hard against her stomach. Her hands were so caked with dirt now she wasn’t sure what she was feeling.
She could hear Alex bashing his way through the trees, swearing and hitting at branches. She knew the quickest path up, had worn it in herself over the last 20 years. The bush had got thicker since then, especially on the hill. The trees were tighter together, bunched right up so you could hardly see in front of you. Great, towering pines that grew wild and fast, spreading over the land like a bushfire. Jim ordered them chopped down, starting with the ones that grew up through the foundations of the house. But within a few months another would take its place. Jim said he never knew trees to grow so fast. Twigs would start poking through the cracks in the floorboards, leaves and flowers bursting out from the gaps between the wall and the skirting board. The last straw was when a giant blackberry bush had burst forth from the toilet bowl while Jim was sitting on it. From then on his war against the property was the group’s main concern, every day spent battling against an enemy that regenerated overnight.
The land was fairly bare when Mary and Judah rolled in the first time. Judah said it would be a great spot to camp because they could see all the stars. And she was right; the stars were incredible. They pushed the car up to the top of the hill and sat on the roof, smoking herbs, eating fruit. It was a paradise, or something. Before. Before it became cluttered and the fence went up. Before the babies, and the others, and before the barn was built. The stars were close enough to touch. Why would they leave the one place where you could touch the sky? After a while they stopped looking up.
Mary heard Alex come into the clearing behind her, and he wrapped his arms around her belly, and whispered into the folds of her neck. He was always whispering into her, whispering something. She smiled.
“Waiting for Judah.” Her voice seemed to echo, bouncing back at her from the twisted wall of darkening trees. Their limbs danced in the wind, casting deep shadows across Alex’s naked torso. The night moved.
Extracting herself from his clammy embrace, Mary shuffled away. It was silent in the junkyard but for the whispers in the trees. The noises of night filtered in through the fence. The barn door opening and closing, the most familiar sound to them all. Alex was talking. Talking and rolling a cigarette. This is how she had found him on his first barn day, sprawled nearly naked in the loft, smoking his herbs. He was young, much younger than her. At first he tried to palm her off to Harry. But Mary dug her heels in and made him choose her.
As the sweet smell of burning herbs reached her nostrils, she felt a drop of water run down her temple. The night was damp and the dew was settling around her. She wondered how long she had been still. Alex was smoking and she turned to face him. He was jangling the keys in his pocket, nervous, twitching.
“How long has it been now?” He exhaled out his nose. She wasn’t really interested in small talk, but pretended to count in her head anyway. Like they didn’t both know the answer. Like she didn’t know why he was there.
“How are the others?” Her voice was thin.
Alex looked at the moon. It was an odd, almost-full shape. Nearly there.
“Jim’s got them ready.”
“I asked him to wait.”
“We did wait, we are waiting.”
She’d been expecting this, of course. The full moon was her deadline, the deadline for them all. She ran a hand over the rough fabric of her dress. She’d watched as the moon had grown fuller, marking the days on one of the trees with her little mirror. A line for a day. Six lines and a slash makes the full week. Jim kept extending, giving her more time, getting more and more agitated. Fewer hands on deck meant the trees were growing more wildly than ever. Next moon, next moon.
Alex came up behind her again, this time nuzzling his face into her neck. Kissed her shoulder and rubbed his teenage whiskers against her arm. Whispering something in her ear, he slipped a finger under her sleeve and felt her bra strap. He stopped.
“What’s this?”
He snapped it against her skin.
“I just wear it when I’m pregnant. It helps.”
“You shouldn’t. It’s not the rules.”
He kissed her neck again. Waited for her to move. Reaching into her front pocket, Alex pulled out Mary’s cracked piece of mirror, its sharp edges reflecting in the moonlight. She stood in silence as he rhythmically cut the bra away from the fabric, carving at Judah’s stitches til they snapped. He ripped the last few centimetres, tearing a small hole in the bust of her smock.
“Jim will prefer it this way.”
Thump thump. Thump thump.
Her toe throbbed. She looked down and saw little bugs crawling over the cut, drowning in the drops of blood that still leaked from it. She sensed movement in the trees. The other girls were there, hiding, hidden, lingering at the edges. The moon was drawing them out. Judah would be here soon, too, Mary was sure.
Alex threw his cigarette into a pile of wet leaves.
“I should go. They’ll be waiting. Will you be here?”
Mary snorted. “Where else?”
She stood, silent, listening to the fading sounds of him crashing his way through the bushland. At the bottom of the hill she heard the slam of the gate, the crunch of metal on metal as he locked them back in.
Mary looked at the big sign leaning against a tree. It used to hang over the entrance, down by the main road, welcoming you in. That’s why Judah took the turn – Brightside. It came down in the storm and Jim never got around to putting it back. There were enough people. Enough to keep things going. The sign stared back at her, a wide smile, laughing. The big sun that spilled out behind the letters was fading, the whole thing cracking and split. Judah had kicked it when Mary told her she was going to be a mum. Not that they used that word here. Not ‘mum’. The little ones just got mixed in, all fat legs and dirty feet. But you knew which ones were yours, of course. Of course you knew.
They had come in spring, stayed for the summer, planned to move when winter set in. Then, they were to leave when Spring broke. Then they stayed for one more summer. Then summer came, and Mary was pregnant. And so they stayed, for Harry. For Harry, and then for Fox. And Rowan. And Noah, Gus, James, Finn, Ben, Eddy, Luke, Ethan, Aidan, Marc and Jack. Mary’s boys. There was a hole in her dress, around near her hip. She’d torn it with Harry, snagged it on a rusted metal spring sticking out of the back seat of the car. She fingered the hole now; her hardened and jaundiced flesh exposed beneath it. The dress had a scar from each of her boys, a stain, a memory. They moved with her every day, rubbing off on her skin, working their way into the fibres of the fabric.
Mary’s eyes dropped. Harry had smiled at her on his first barn day. He had wanted her, wanted the lady who gave him presents once a year. He moved toward her and she turned away. You knew which ones were yours.
Mary ran her fingers over the dent on the bonnet, the dent Judah had forged in a rage. She remembered. Judah had her legs up on the dash, she was sweating, dilated, screaming down the hill, pushing. Waiting. Pushing, waiting. Their hearts pounding in their ears. Thump thump. Thump thump. Screams echoing down the hill. The thumps grew louder and played beat to Judah’s cries, rising up from under them. From the ground. Thump thump. The trees shook. Thump thump. She screamed Jim’s name one last time, and then just … silence. Nothing. They were alone, waiting for a sound. A cry. It was just them, and the thump thump of the earth under their feet. They stayed there in silence until it faded away. The sun rose on them the next morning, Judah sitting hunched on the roof of the car. They buried her child in the green grass under the bonnet. That was the night the silence began to creep in. Judah didn’t leave the car after that. She locked herself in, barely eating. So weak she wasn’t a threat to anyone. Jim almost forgot about her, in time. Almost. And then the junk came. Judah started hauling it in, finding bits in the bush, bits people had dumped. Washing machines, ovens, tyres, bassinets, rattles. As the junk piled up there would be less and less room to move. Then came the animals, the rats, and together they shared this new home, a warren of debris.
Mary jumped, the sound of the car door opening bringing her back to the junkyard. Two grubby, child-like feet emerged from the back seat. Carly, her hair matted against her head, was swaddled in fabric, her mid-section wrapped up like a baby. Dried blood stained the inside of her legs, and flies crawled over her knees.
She smiled up at Mary. “I didn’t see you.” Her eyes flicked up at the moon. She began to unwrap her bandages, and with each layer of fabric that she removed, the stains grew redder and the flies swarmed harder.
“I can’t stop them.” Exposing herself finally, Mary saw. Bugs crawled in and around Carly’s vagina, feeding on the rich and steady stream of blood. She’d been bleeding for six months now, no amount of gauze able to staunch the flow.
“Is it tonight?”
It wasn’t really a question. Her eyes flicked to the moon again. Mary didn’t offer a reply.
“I thought I’d get rid of the bandages. I want to bleed all over the bastards.”
“Alex said they were coming. Later. Tonight.”
“Fern will be here. And Heather.”
Their numbers had grown. First it was just Mary. Ten months pregnant had caused a bit of a stir. No one knew what to do. Trent had all the birthing equipment in the house, but Mary refused to let him touch her. Not after Rory. At twelve months they locked her in the barn. Tried to sweat it out. Then she was moved out, sent up here to be with Judah. Things were ok then. It was only once Fern came to join them that things started to change. While Jim rallied teams to save the house from the trees, the grass in the junkyard turned brown, death rippling out from beneath the car. The fruit stopped growing, and around them the trees grew thicker, locking in their little patch of land.
Some of the other girls would sneak up to the junkyard at night to be with them, using Mary’s secret path to avoid the blackberry bushes. They would sit and talk and think of names for Mary’s baby, the baby that refused to come. A girl, Mary was sure, her very own baby girl. Clara, or Eve. She was seventeen months along and Jim gave her a deadline. But it wasn’t just her anymore. And that’s when the gate went up.
Behind her, the trees began to stir. Fern emerged first, her hair short and choppy, dress caked in dirt. She went bush after Jim kicked her out, and on the nights Mary used to wait up for Judah to return, she would catch sight of Fern’s marauding figure pacing among the trees. Heather hobbled out next, dragging her left leg behind her. Fiona, Penny, Anna, Sara. Their eyes all on the moon. Clouds were forming, but the moon took centre stage, washing them all in grey.
Fern was chattering away, taking her position on the boot of the car, the others listening intently. She was drawing on a scabby little cigarette, her horse teeth brown and sticking in her red gums like pegs, and talking loudly to the girls. Mary’s eyes flicked down and she noticed movement between Fern’s legs, under her smock. “You shoulda seen the look on Jim’s face when he tried to stick it in. This giant fuckin’ tongue flicks outta me and hisses at him. He flipped. Din even stick around long enough to see the teeth.”
Penny was braiding the fine grass that was growing in place of Heather’s hair, the leaves forming curls around her ears. She picked at the bark scabs growing up both her legs and her toes wiggled out toward the earth, roots seeking a place to plant themselves. Anna’s feathers ruffled in the breeze and she pushed her head under her shoulder to shield herself.
Mary eyed the horizon, looking for Judah’s telltale frame, her long limbs and wild hair. She’d never stayed away this long. She thought of the bird, of the fresh earth that had been piled on top of it, burying it. She’d promised to leave one day, after Mary had her little girl. After.
The moon cast deep shadows across the faces of the assembled women. Their chatter softened as the sounds of a gathering crowd filtered up the hill. The chill of Jim’s shouting voice cut through the night air and Mary’s heart was in her throat.
She pressed her ear against the bonnet of the car and closed her eyes. The wind picked up, carrying whispers and the soft patter of footsteps around her. The night sighed, the damp sitting heavily on their shoulders, pushing them down. She breathed. Thump thump. She climbed up, leaning on the girls for support, the smashed-out headlight cavity cupping her foot and boosting her up. The car groaned under her weight, and she shifted until it was comfortable, quiet. Standing on the tips of her toes, she could see all the way down to the bottom of the hill. The land dipped away beneath her, rolling and tumbling its way toward the horizon. The geography had changed in her time here. Hills had swollen and melted away, a giant breathing mass expanding and contracting with the seasons. She pressed her hand firmly against her belly. Goosebumps ran the full length of her arm, the cold slowly seeping in. There was just one heartbeat, now.
There was a wind, too, one of those winds that come with evening, a wind with a breath of warmth from the day just gone and a chilly edge warning of worse to come.
From the Dark End of the Street
Mary knew it had been too long. Her belly had grown out so far she couldn’t see her feet anymore. Not that she liked her feet. She hated the way her gnarled toes stuck at out odd angles. She used to sit on the roof of the car and pick at her toenails with a bit of broken mirror, wedging the corner in between the nail and her flesh, scraping the dirt away. She preferred being clean. All of the girls had different approaches. Some liked to be dirty, thought it made them blend in more. Mary was beginning to blend in now. If she stood still for long enough she thought maybe she could feel the moss creep up from the rocks and crawl in between her toes. Maybe. Everything grew fast here.
“Can you hear me in there, baby? I promise. Soon enough, baby. I promise.”
She leaned against the bonnet of the car, one hand supporting her weight, the other firmly on her swollen and distended belly. It stayed there a lot now, patting, or rubbing. She liked to feel the heat that radiated through the rough fabric of the smock under her hand. Judah had cut it for her, stitched it together with string and laces. It was made from scraps of brown and green, an old tablecloth, a birthing blanket. She sewed a bra in to the front and hid the stitches with more fabric. Her special baby dress. It was nearly worn through after all these years.
Standing where she was, in the centre of the junkyard, her view of the fields below was obscured by a great wall of impenetrable bushland, strong trees guarding over her. On either side, two great wings of junk hugged the perimeter. Ovens and washing machines, black with rust; bookshelves mouldy and damp, eaten alive by the termites that relocated after they destroyed part of the barn years earlier. The once great fruit trees that hung low over the top of her, the trees in which she had played, in which her boys had played, were reduced to skinny and brittle fruitless fingers, drooping down and tickling the heads of all who walked under them. The smell of rotting fruit hung over the car, apple and pear cores melting into the earth around her feet. Ants scurried across her toes, burying themselves in among the moist dead leaves. The ground was seething with life, buried under years of debris.
She moved her feet, feeling the sticky, damp earth between her toes. Something stabbed at her flesh, and she squatted down to see what it was. Buried under a rotting pear, in a small depression covered with fresh compost, was a small bone. Two bones, three. More. A hundred tiny bones caked with dirt. A hundred tiny bones in formation. Her heart leapt. She brushed away some earth. A wing. A bird’s wing. Then the body of the bird, hastily buried, feathers sticking to the rotting flesh, squirming maggots feasting on what was left. Her toe was bleeding now, the blood dark against her skin.
The last of the day’s warmth was slipping behind the trees and night began to settle. Mary’s eyes, sinking away into their sockets, felt heavy with sleep. But she would stay awake, at least until Judah came. It was different this time, but she always turned up. Eventually.
She stopped. A noise. Footsteps coming up the hill behind her. Alex. She knew that Jim had sent him, that the men would be looking for her, but she liked the air up here. She could breathe. She looked up at the nearly full moon and her heart rate quickened. At least, she thought it was her heart. She’d first felt the baby’s heartbeat at four months, a dull knocking inside her. At eleven months it was almost in sync with hers, out by just enough to reassure her it was still there. She pressed her fingers hard against her stomach. Her hands were so caked with dirt now she wasn’t sure what she was feeling.
She could hear Alex bashing his way through the trees, swearing and hitting at branches. She knew the quickest path up, had worn it in herself over the last 20 years. The bush had got thicker since then, especially on the hill. The trees were tighter together, bunched right up so you could hardly see in front of you. Great, towering pines that grew wild and fast, spreading over the land like a bushfire. Jim ordered them chopped down, starting with the ones that grew up through the foundations of the house. But within a few months another would take its place. Jim said he never knew trees to grow so fast. Twigs would start poking through the cracks in the floorboards, leaves and flowers bursting out from the gaps between the wall and the skirting board. The last straw was when a giant blackberry bush had burst forth from the toilet bowl while Jim was sitting on it. From then on his war against the property was the group’s main concern, every day spent battling against an enemy that regenerated overnight.
The land was fairly bare when Mary and Judah rolled in the first time. Judah said it would be a great spot to camp because they could see all the stars. And she was right; the stars were incredible. They pushed the car up to the top of the hill and sat on the roof, smoking herbs, eating fruit. It was a paradise, or something. Before. Before it became cluttered and the fence went up. Before the babies, and the others, and before the barn was built. The stars were close enough to touch. Why would they leave the one place where you could touch the sky? After a while they stopped looking up.
Mary heard Alex come into the clearing behind her, and he wrapped his arms around her belly, and whispered into the folds of her neck. He was always whispering into her, whispering something. She smiled.
“Waiting for Judah.” Her voice seemed to echo, bouncing back at her from the twisted wall of darkening trees. Their limbs danced in the wind, casting deep shadows across Alex’s naked torso. The night moved.
Extracting herself from his clammy embrace, Mary shuffled away. It was silent in the junkyard but for the whispers in the trees. The noises of night filtered in through the fence. The barn door opening and closing, the most familiar sound to them all. Alex was talking. Talking and rolling a cigarette. This is how she had found him on his first barn day, sprawled nearly naked in the loft, smoking his herbs. He was young, much younger than her. At first he tried to palm her off to Harry. But Mary dug her heels in and made him choose her.
As the sweet smell of burning herbs reached her nostrils, she felt a drop of water run down her temple. The night was damp and the dew was settling around her. She wondered how long she had been still. Alex was smoking and she turned to face him. He was jangling the keys in his pocket, nervous, twitching.
“How long has it been now?” He exhaled out his nose. She wasn’t really interested in small talk, but pretended to count in her head anyway. Like they didn’t both know the answer. Like she didn’t know why he was there.
“How are the others?” Her voice was thin.
Alex looked at the moon. It was an odd, almost-full shape. Nearly there.
“Jim’s got them ready.”
“I asked him to wait.”
“We did wait, we are waiting.”
She’d been expecting this, of course. The full moon was her deadline, the deadline for them all. She ran a hand over the rough fabric of her dress. She’d watched as the moon had grown fuller, marking the days on one of the trees with her little mirror. A line for a day. Six lines and a slash makes the full week. Jim kept extending, giving her more time, getting more and more agitated. Fewer hands on deck meant the trees were growing more wildly than ever. Next moon, next moon.
Alex came up behind her again, this time nuzzling his face into her neck. Kissed her shoulder and rubbed his teenage whiskers against her arm. Whispering something in her ear, he slipped a finger under her sleeve and felt her bra strap. He stopped.
“What’s this?”
He snapped it against her skin.
“I just wear it when I’m pregnant. It helps.”
“You shouldn’t. It’s not the rules.”
He kissed her neck again. Waited for her to move. Reaching into her front pocket, Alex pulled out Mary’s cracked piece of mirror, its sharp edges reflecting in the moonlight. She stood in silence as he rhythmically cut the bra away from the fabric, carving at Judah’s stitches til they snapped. He ripped the last few centimetres, tearing a small hole in the bust of her smock.
“Jim will prefer it this way.”
Thump thump. Thump thump.
Her toe throbbed. She looked down and saw little bugs crawling over the cut, drowning in the drops of blood that still leaked from it. She sensed movement in the trees. The other girls were there, hiding, hidden, lingering at the edges. The moon was drawing them out. Judah would be here soon, too, Mary was sure.
Alex threw his cigarette into a pile of wet leaves.
“I should go. They’ll be waiting. Will you be here?”
Mary snorted. “Where else?”
She stood, silent, listening to the fading sounds of him crashing his way through the bushland. At the bottom of the hill she heard the slam of the gate, the crunch of metal on metal as he locked them back in.
Mary looked at the big sign leaning against a tree. It used to hang over the entrance, down by the main road, welcoming you in. That’s why Judah took the turn – Brightside. It came down in the storm and Jim never got around to putting it back. There were enough people. Enough to keep things going. The sign stared back at her, a wide smile, laughing. The big sun that spilled out behind the letters was fading, the whole thing cracking and split. Judah had kicked it when Mary told her she was going to be a mum. Not that they used that word here. Not ‘mum’. The little ones just got mixed in, all fat legs and dirty feet. But you knew which ones were yours, of course. Of course you knew.
They had come in spring, stayed for the summer, planned to move when winter set in. Then, they were to leave when Spring broke. Then they stayed for one more summer. Then summer came, and Mary was pregnant. And so they stayed, for Harry. For Harry, and then for Fox. And Rowan. And Noah, Gus, James, Finn, Ben, Eddy, Luke, Ethan, Aidan, Marc and Jack. Mary’s boys. There was a hole in her dress, around near her hip. She’d torn it with Harry, snagged it on a rusted metal spring sticking out of the back seat of the car. She fingered the hole now; her hardened and jaundiced flesh exposed beneath it. The dress had a scar from each of her boys, a stain, a memory. They moved with her every day, rubbing off on her skin, working their way into the fibres of the fabric.
Mary’s eyes dropped. Harry had smiled at her on his first barn day. He had wanted her, wanted the lady who gave him presents once a year. He moved toward her and she turned away. You knew which ones were yours.
Mary ran her fingers over the dent on the bonnet, the dent Judah had forged in a rage. She remembered. Judah had her legs up on the dash, she was sweating, dilated, screaming down the hill, pushing. Waiting. Pushing, waiting. Their hearts pounding in their ears. Thump thump. Thump thump. Screams echoing down the hill. The thumps grew louder and played beat to Judah’s cries, rising up from under them. From the ground. Thump thump. The trees shook. Thump thump. She screamed Jim’s name one last time, and then just … silence. Nothing. They were alone, waiting for a sound. A cry. It was just them, and the thump thump of the earth under their feet. They stayed there in silence until it faded away. The sun rose on them the next morning, Judah sitting hunched on the roof of the car. They buried her child in the green grass under the bonnet. That was the night the silence began to creep in. Judah didn’t leave the car after that. She locked herself in, barely eating. So weak she wasn’t a threat to anyone. Jim almost forgot about her, in time. Almost. And then the junk came. Judah started hauling it in, finding bits in the bush, bits people had dumped. Washing machines, ovens, tyres, bassinets, rattles. As the junk piled up there would be less and less room to move. Then came the animals, the rats, and together they shared this new home, a warren of debris.
Mary jumped, the sound of the car door opening bringing her back to the junkyard. Two grubby, child-like feet emerged from the back seat. Carly, her hair matted against her head, was swaddled in fabric, her mid-section wrapped up like a baby. Dried blood stained the inside of her legs, and flies crawled over her knees.
She smiled up at Mary. “I didn’t see you.” Her eyes flicked up at the moon. She began to unwrap her bandages, and with each layer of fabric that she removed, the stains grew redder and the flies swarmed harder.
“I can’t stop them.” Exposing herself finally, Mary saw. Bugs crawled in and around Carly’s vagina, feeding on the rich and steady stream of blood. She’d been bleeding for six months now, no amount of gauze able to staunch the flow.
“Is it tonight?”
It wasn’t really a question. Her eyes flicked to the moon again. Mary didn’t offer a reply.
“I thought I’d get rid of the bandages. I want to bleed all over the bastards.”
“Alex said they were coming. Later. Tonight.”
“Fern will be here. And Heather.”
Their numbers had grown. First it was just Mary. Ten months pregnant had caused a bit of a stir. No one knew what to do. Trent had all the birthing equipment in the house, but Mary refused to let him touch her. Not after Rory. At twelve months they locked her in the barn. Tried to sweat it out. Then she was moved out, sent up here to be with Judah. Things were ok then. It was only once Fern came to join them that things started to change. While Jim rallied teams to save the house from the trees, the grass in the junkyard turned brown, death rippling out from beneath the car. The fruit stopped growing, and around them the trees grew thicker, locking in their little patch of land.
Some of the other girls would sneak up to the junkyard at night to be with them, using Mary’s secret path to avoid the blackberry bushes. They would sit and talk and think of names for Mary’s baby, the baby that refused to come. A girl, Mary was sure, her very own baby girl. Clara, or Eve. She was seventeen months along and Jim gave her a deadline. But it wasn’t just her anymore. And that’s when the gate went up.
Behind her, the trees began to stir. Fern emerged first, her hair short and choppy, dress caked in dirt. She went bush after Jim kicked her out, and on the nights Mary used to wait up for Judah to return, she would catch sight of Fern’s marauding figure pacing among the trees. Heather hobbled out next, dragging her left leg behind her. Fiona, Penny, Anna, Sara. Their eyes all on the moon. Clouds were forming, but the moon took centre stage, washing them all in grey.
Fern was chattering away, taking her position on the boot of the car, the others listening intently. She was drawing on a scabby little cigarette, her horse teeth brown and sticking in her red gums like pegs, and talking loudly to the girls. Mary’s eyes flicked down and she noticed movement between Fern’s legs, under her smock. “You shoulda seen the look on Jim’s face when he tried to stick it in. This giant fuckin’ tongue flicks outta me and hisses at him. He flipped. Din even stick around long enough to see the teeth.”
Penny was braiding the fine grass that was growing in place of Heather’s hair, the leaves forming curls around her ears. She picked at the bark scabs growing up both her legs and her toes wiggled out toward the earth, roots seeking a place to plant themselves. Anna’s feathers ruffled in the breeze and she pushed her head under her shoulder to shield herself.
Mary eyed the horizon, looking for Judah’s telltale frame, her long limbs and wild hair. She’d never stayed away this long. She thought of the bird, of the fresh earth that had been piled on top of it, burying it. She’d promised to leave one day, after Mary had her little girl. After.
The moon cast deep shadows across the faces of the assembled women. Their chatter softened as the sounds of a gathering crowd filtered up the hill. The chill of Jim’s shouting voice cut through the night air and Mary’s heart was in her throat.
She pressed her ear against the bonnet of the car and closed her eyes. The wind picked up, carrying whispers and the soft patter of footsteps around her. The night sighed, the damp sitting heavily on their shoulders, pushing them down. She breathed. Thump thump. She climbed up, leaning on the girls for support, the smashed-out headlight cavity cupping her foot and boosting her up. The car groaned under her weight, and she shifted until it was comfortable, quiet. Standing on the tips of her toes, she could see all the way down to the bottom of the hill. The land dipped away beneath her, rolling and tumbling its way toward the horizon. The geography had changed in her time here. Hills had swollen and melted away, a giant breathing mass expanding and contracting with the seasons. She pressed her hand firmly against her belly. Goosebumps ran the full length of her arm, the cold slowly seeping in. There was just one heartbeat, now.
There was a wind, too, one of those winds that come with evening, a wind with a breath of warmth from the day just gone and a chilly edge warning of worse to come.
the fairytale is dead.
This piece was written in 2007. It was for a diaries and autobiographies class. I used old journals and old memories to piece it together.
the fairytale is dead
My knees are pressing into the hard plastic and I can’t get comfortable. In a town with a name I can’t pronounce, I haven’t been comfortable for a while. Or clean. I haven’t been comfortable or clean since I was somewhere with a name I could pronounce. Pronounce properly, without struggle. Right now I am struggling. It’s been ten hours and eleven thousand minutes and my knees are pressing into the hard plastic and I can’t get comfortable. I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten since last night when I got a pie from the bus terminus, except it wasn’t the kind of pie I was familiar with, the kind of pie I knew from back home. It was flatter and brown and had some yellow on the top, and, thinking back, I’m not entirely convinced it was a pie. It was a mistake to buy it. It was a mistake to pay seven Euros for it. It was also a mistake to eat it so quickly. I ate it quickly because the bus driver growled at me when I tried to eat it in the bus and I was too scared to make her wait for me to eat it and too hungry to throw it away. It was a mistake to eat it so quickly because I can now feel it, sitting, whole, in the pit of my stomach. I haven’t been to the toilet in three days. Everything I’ve eaten in the past week has either given me diarrhoea or indigestion and I’m too scared to eat anything else in case the nine-hour trip I have ahead of me is jeopardised. I farted before, and tried to blame it on the old man behind me. It wasn’t noisy, my farts are rarely noisy and often unnoticeable, but I hadn’t been to the toilet for three days, so it wasn’t like a normal fart. It was just gas, of course, I didn’t shit myself, but gas has different consistencies, and this was definitely on the thicker side. It was like in that film, The Ten Commandments, when the green mist that is the Angel of Death settles over Egypt, and all the first-born sons die. It was like that, except it wasn’t green, but I could definitely sense its presence, and I could sense that those around me sensed its presence. Everyone screwed up their noses and shifted slightly in their seats. It smelt like boiled lamb. And Communism. This whole country smells like boiled lamb and Communism. The bus pulls into a roadside diner and we’re give ten minutes to stretch our legs. I make a dash for the toilet but I’m too late and there’s already a queue of people at the port-a-loo. Everyone is standing very still, jaws set, concentrating. We’re on the other side of the world and all of a sudden shitting becomes the only thing you can think about.
I wander into the newsagency and browse through a few trashy magazine before the old lady behind the counter snarls at me. I buy a bottle of water and some chewing gum and a some tissues and then I spot a notebook and think it might be good to write in a journal or something, so I buy that too. The bus driver is blasting her horn and begins to pull away from the rest stop so I’m sprinting across the carpark and I have to chase the bus a few metres and then I just manage to jump on through the open door, and then she breaks suddenly and I fall over and my things go everywhere.
Once upon a time lived a big girl named Cathelijn. She grew up in a little house full of little people. Her father was a farmer and her mother helped her father be a farmer. She had six older brothers and sisters. Her family was not very wealthy, and so Cathelijn was made to wear Betje’s hand-me-down clothes. Sadly, Cathelijn was no less than three times bigger than her older sister. Cathelijn’s mother taught her to sew when she was six, and so Cathelijn would spend her afternoons sewing all her hand-me-down dresses together to make one big dress that was just the right size.
On her 13th birthday, Cathelijn’s family bought nine beautiful white horses, one for each of the family. They would be going on a holiday together and the horses were to be their mode of transport. Her brothers and sisters mounted their beasts with ease. Cathelijn struggled atop her horse, who, under her weight, stumbled forward a few paces and collapsed. As the animal lay dying on the ground, and her sisters giggled into their hands, her mother announced – “You’ll have to go and stay with your grandmother while we’re away”.
Grandma Gerdina was an artist, and her house was filled with paintings and drawings of flowers and faces. Her favourite thing to do, though, above all others, was to sculpt. Gerdina used clay and metal and dirt and dough and foodscraps to make her sculptures. Sometimes they would go in the garden and the birds would eat them. Other times she would pull them apart and make something else out of the same material. When Cathelijn arrived, Gerdina was sitting in her workshed, busying herself on her latest project – a giant viking ship, intricately carved from the wood of the trees in her garden. It was the size of a big dinner table, and had a wooden floor and a wooden mast and, on its nose, a big wooden dragon was roaring.
Every day for many weeks, Gerdina would work on the ship, carving away at its fine edges, whilst Cathelijn sat in the corner, making a viking helmet from the wood scraps her grandmother gave her. Gerdina would tell her granddaughter the story of Anke, a Viking warrior who commandeered her own ship and sailed the seas seeking adventure and exploring far off lands and places. She told her about the people Anke stole from, and the people she saved. And then she told her about how Anke died, and about how her family placed her body onto her boat and set it on fire before putting it out to sea.
One Saturday morning, Cathelijn got up to fix her grandmother some breakfast. She made eggs and tea and toast and put the whole meal on a big tray, like she usually did on Saturdays, and took it into her grandmother’s room.
But when Cathelijn went into Gerdina’s room, the old woman wasn’t sitting up like she usually was on a Saturday morning, planning her next project, surrounded by sketches. She didn’t have her notebook out, or her pencils, and she wasn’t propped up on two pillows, and her glasses weren’t perched gently on the edge of her nose, and she wasn’t smiling warmly. She was dead.
Cathelijn sat down on the bed and cried for a little while. Then she had a sip of her grandmother’s tea, and a bite of the toast, and a taste of the eggs. The toast was good, but the eggs weren’t very tasty at all, the sour berries adding a horrid flavour to the whole meal. After breakfast, Cathelijn busied herself around the house, cleaning and washing. She’d been thinking her grandmother would be dead soon, and so had been planning for it. A bag was packed under the bed, and a carefully chosen outfit hanging on the back of her bedroom door.
When the cleaning was finished, and the dishes were all washed, and the fire was well and truly out, Cathelijn decided it was time. She went to her room and pulled her travel bag from under the bed. She stripped down to her underclothes and got dressed again in the outfit she had chosen for this occasion.
She pushed the ship out of the workshop and into the yard, and then from the yard all the way down the hill to the edge of the forest, through the forest and into a clearing. She paused for a moment to catch her breath. Then out of the clearing and into more of the forest, and she kept pushing the whole time, until the sun was nearly setting. When she reached the water, the last golden rays of daylight were disappearing over the horizon. She cut open the cotton sack that she was dragging behind her and manoeuvred her grandmother’s stiff body onto the deck of the ship. Cathelijn took the viking helmet off her head and placed it gently on Gerdina’s, sweeping a few grey hairs off the old woman’s face. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a packet of matches, and she lit one and threw it onto the ship and pushed it out to sea. The fire smouldered for a little while, and then caught onto Gerdina’s cotton dress, and the flames got bigger and bigger, and the boat moved further out toward the horizon.
Three days earlier, in a bookstore in Zadar, I devour the shop's English-language section, the whole two shelves of it. My bags spill around me and I’m on the floor surrounded by books and magazines. I read everything, trying furiously to absorb it all, knowing I can’t afford to buy books and should really be looking for somewhere to sleep. I don’t look for somewhere to sleep, though. I buy six books instead. Six books by the same author, one of those series' about men and women and relationships and Labradors and the baby that brings them all together into one dysfunctional yet happy family who somehow manage to afford a warehouse loft conversion in Notting Hill while working part-time as writers or sculptors or graphic designers. The books aren't particularly highbrow, and after reading a few chapters I begin to wonder how they got published in the first place, but they're in English and I haven't heard or spoken English in a very long time, so I feel like these books, these six books, are going to save my life. I buy them, and as the cashier rings up the total I try and do the sums in my head - how much I spent minus the cost of dinner plus a cheap room multiplied by a packet of rolling tobacco equals I'm fucked. I've just fucked myself and all I have to show for it are six shit books.
On my way out of the store I spot a seventh. It’s a book of Beatles lyrics. It’s only five Euro and I’ve already spent so much money that it seems cheap. I dog-ear the songs we sang together and scribble a note on the inside cover. I tell myself that I'll post it later and now, sitting on the bus three days later with the lyric book in my hands, I promise myself again that at the next rest stop I will post it.
Kanat had two sets of drumsticks. One good pair and one bad pair. The bad pair were the colour of bleached bones, brittle and covered in chips and bruises. The good pair were red and robust, and so shiny that he could see his face in the reflection. Every day, after lessons had finished, the School Band would gather with the choir in the hall, and after they had tuned their instruments and warmed their voices, they would be silent. The bandmaster, Luba, a very tall, very thin man with jet black hair and a clean face, would sweep into the room and . He would conduct the band with a long metal baton that he would spend minutes shining before each rehearsal, while the band waited for him in silence. He would tap his music stand four times, nod curtly just once, and the band would play. Kanat drummed in perfect time, using his best red drumsticks. The choir would join in and sing about crimson scarves and marching toward victory. These were the only songs that the children were allowed to play and sing.
Each afternoon, halfway through rehearsal, Luba would raise his hands in a call for silence and announce a ten minute break. He would go outside the hall and smoke cigarettes in the cold air. When this hapenned, Kanat would do two things. Always two things, and always in the same order. First, he would loosen his tie. The others followed his lead. Then, he would collect from his schoolbag his brittle and bruised drumsticks. He would strike them together four times and begin to play. None of the children in the choir knew what the words to the songs meant, but Paul McCartney and John Lennon were known even in this small town. Luba would be gone for exactly four minutes, and the song went for three minutes and forty seconds, so if the group were quick enough, they could easily fit in a banned song before the break was over. But one day, the day on which this story is set, Luba came back early. The band members fell silent, one by one, as each of them in turn noticed the man's dark shape walking toward them. Kanat, though, with his eyes closed, continued to drum loudly and with wild abandon. When he finally noticed those around him had stopped playing, heopened his eyes. Kanat looked at Luba and Luba stared right back at Kanat.
Later that night, when Kanat was walking home, a group of men stepped out from behind a tree and hit the schoolboy with hammers until he bled. From then on, Kanat could only play drums with one hand.
Twenty-five years later, Kanat and his wife Elly and their friend, an Australian teenager, sit in a poky flat in north-west London, in a building full of grubby little people, on a street called Penny Lane. They drink vodka and water, and they tell him they don't know much about British music, so the boy pulls out his iPod and tells them he has to play them a song, a great song by this great band, a song that their street has got to be named after. Elly tries to stop him playing the song, but before she has a chance to say anything, Paul McCartney's voice is filling the small kitchen. The boy is singing and dancing, waving his arms above his head, but Elly is watching her husband. His eyes are filled with tears, and he is smiling from ear to ear.
I wake up somewhere just outside Split because I can feel something rustling against my legs, and my first thought, before I even open my eyes, is to pull my bag close to my chest and say a small prayer. Not a prayer, as such, but something like a prayer, a sort of wish, asked for with earnest. Please, always ask nicely, I’ve only got a few hundred kilometres to go. When I open my eyes, expecting the worst – expecting a knife, or a twisted smile or, at the very least, an old man in a trenchcoat – it’s not that bad at all. I open my eyes and instead of a murderer or a pervert or a robber, its just Piotr, and he’s got a little photo album, and he’s pointing. Piotr is the guy who has been sitting next to me since we left Dubvrovnik, the Polish guy who talks with a heavy accent, has a cleft lip and no teeth. I can’t understand most of what he says. He keeps talking to me, though, and I keep nodding earnestly. He shows me a scar on his arm, and explains that it came from the piece of glass that pierced him when the train next to his on the Underground exploded. I show him a scar on my eyebrow from when Lachlan Bull smacked me in the head with a Transformer when I was seven.
While I struggle to understand why this man I don’t know would wake me up to show me photos of other people I don’t know, he starts talking with his heavy accent and I just start nodding. He’s pointing at a picture of a house, and then of a tree, and then of a barn, and then of that same barn on fire. He keeps flicking through the pictures and pointing and muttering something about each of them, and I keep nodding, and then he stops. He stops on a picture that looks a lot like most of the other pictures, just craggy countryside and broken buildings. But then I see the little black ball on the ground, the mangy little puppy dog sleeping on a rock with his little puppy eyes closed tight against the wind. Piotr doesn’t say anything for a minute, just looks at the picture, and then he turns the page and there’s another barn with its roof on fire.
Piotr Gabka was a simple man with simple tastes. He had a vegetable that grew just enough leafy vegetables for tomorrow night’s dinner. His house was little and clean and, though lacking a woman’s touch, was always warm with the fire carefully stoked.
Every day he would go walking through his fields, admiring the trees and the flowers. One day, Piotr was out walking in one of the furthest fields in the west, where the horizon was interrupted only by a row of tall paperbark trees, and a run-down wooden building once used to keep hay. He loved this part of his property because, although it was particularly wild, it was still beautiful. He rarely walked there because the paths had become covered with weeds and the angry roots of old trees, so it was no longer safe. It was the only piece of land he couldn’t see from his kitchen window.
While he was there, walking, he found a small pup lying in the sun, gnawing on an old chicken bone. The pup was lean and short-haired, with ears that stuck straight up in the air. The pup froze and stared at the old man a second, before resuming work on the bone. Piotr reached into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of bread he was keeping as a snack. The puppy ran over and snatched it away, chewing on it until his mouth was covered in foam. Piot patted the dog goodnight and scurried home.
The next day, Piotr went back with some more bread. The puppy ate it all up. The day after that he went back again, this time with some vegetables from the garden, all chopped up and cooked in a stew. Piot visited the puppy on its patch of land every day for many many months, until the puppy grew into a dog. Every day, without fail, the pair would meet by the rock, Piotr always carring a plate full of food which the dog devoured as if starving. Every day Piotr got a little thinner as the food he saved for himself became less and less. Soon all he ate for dinner was a cup of sweet tea and yesterday’s bread. Piotr didn’t mind, though. He felt best when lying in bed at night, a dull hunger inside him, in the knowledge that his friend was sleeping somewhere on a full stomach. He looked forward to seeing him every day, and every day the dog was there.
Except one day, when it wasn’t. It was gone. Piotr called to it and waited for several hours, until the sun was down. The dog never came. It stayed away for three nights, and then, as suddenly as it had disappeared, it was back, and this time with a friend. Piotr saw the friends for the first time as he approached the rock. A second black body was lying, stretched out on the grass. Piotr had continued to arrive at their meeting place each night in the hope that the dog would return. As Piotr approached the dogs, they both stood to attention. From inside the belly of the boy, he heard a low growl. Teeth bared and eyes white, they both started barking loudly, snapping their jaws at the old man. Piotr dropped the terracotta bowl he was carrying, and the dogs’ food sprayed everywhere. Then, as Piotr took one small step back, the dogs leapt. They grabbed at the old man’s clothes, nipping at his heels and biting at his hands. Piotr turned to run and the dogs chased him, barking madly. Eventually, when Piotr was wheezing from running, and his hands bloody from the bites, he stopped and turned to look at the animals. They had walked back to their rock, and stood on its top, starting back at him. Piotr limped back to the house.
Gripping the bus’s address system with one hammy fist, the driver clears her voice and announces that Thankyou for using Samborcek Buses and it has been a pleasure driving us and we are nearing our final stop and could everyone please could collect their bags and rubbish etc. She switches off the microphone and pulls her raggedy old shawl tight around her shoulders.
Our last stop is Zagreb airport. I hope they have nice toilets. A whole lot of people got off at the previous stop, my Polish friend included. He patted me on the head and insisted I was a Good Boy, and then left. I’m getting closer, now. I pack up my books and magazines and iPod and put my journal in my bag. The woman next to me is napping on her husband's shoulder. His eyes watch the road in front, and the headphones in his ears play the same song over and over again, his walkman nestled in the palm of his twisted and broken hand.
But the bus never gets to where it’s going. We only fall short by about 20km, which is a pretty good effort considering the age and condition of the bus. But then again it wouldn’t have mattered if we got halfway or only ten minutes down the road, because either way we never got where we were going. An old man being chased by a dog runs in front of the bus, and we swerve to miss him, but we hit him anyway. The man is tossed against a tree and he dies, and then the bus, which is going quite fast at the time, plows through the road barrier and sails over the edge of the cliff and bursts into flames. The dog, a mangy thing riddled with fleas, wags its tail furiously and sticks its head out over the edge, looking down at the mess of flames and twisted metal. He turns around three times, does a wee, and then runs off in the direction of the mountains.
the fairytale is dead
My knees are pressing into the hard plastic and I can’t get comfortable. In a town with a name I can’t pronounce, I haven’t been comfortable for a while. Or clean. I haven’t been comfortable or clean since I was somewhere with a name I could pronounce. Pronounce properly, without struggle. Right now I am struggling. It’s been ten hours and eleven thousand minutes and my knees are pressing into the hard plastic and I can’t get comfortable. I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten since last night when I got a pie from the bus terminus, except it wasn’t the kind of pie I was familiar with, the kind of pie I knew from back home. It was flatter and brown and had some yellow on the top, and, thinking back, I’m not entirely convinced it was a pie. It was a mistake to buy it. It was a mistake to pay seven Euros for it. It was also a mistake to eat it so quickly. I ate it quickly because the bus driver growled at me when I tried to eat it in the bus and I was too scared to make her wait for me to eat it and too hungry to throw it away. It was a mistake to eat it so quickly because I can now feel it, sitting, whole, in the pit of my stomach. I haven’t been to the toilet in three days. Everything I’ve eaten in the past week has either given me diarrhoea or indigestion and I’m too scared to eat anything else in case the nine-hour trip I have ahead of me is jeopardised. I farted before, and tried to blame it on the old man behind me. It wasn’t noisy, my farts are rarely noisy and often unnoticeable, but I hadn’t been to the toilet for three days, so it wasn’t like a normal fart. It was just gas, of course, I didn’t shit myself, but gas has different consistencies, and this was definitely on the thicker side. It was like in that film, The Ten Commandments, when the green mist that is the Angel of Death settles over Egypt, and all the first-born sons die. It was like that, except it wasn’t green, but I could definitely sense its presence, and I could sense that those around me sensed its presence. Everyone screwed up their noses and shifted slightly in their seats. It smelt like boiled lamb. And Communism. This whole country smells like boiled lamb and Communism. The bus pulls into a roadside diner and we’re give ten minutes to stretch our legs. I make a dash for the toilet but I’m too late and there’s already a queue of people at the port-a-loo. Everyone is standing very still, jaws set, concentrating. We’re on the other side of the world and all of a sudden shitting becomes the only thing you can think about.
I wander into the newsagency and browse through a few trashy magazine before the old lady behind the counter snarls at me. I buy a bottle of water and some chewing gum and a some tissues and then I spot a notebook and think it might be good to write in a journal or something, so I buy that too. The bus driver is blasting her horn and begins to pull away from the rest stop so I’m sprinting across the carpark and I have to chase the bus a few metres and then I just manage to jump on through the open door, and then she breaks suddenly and I fall over and my things go everywhere.
Once upon a time lived a big girl named Cathelijn. She grew up in a little house full of little people. Her father was a farmer and her mother helped her father be a farmer. She had six older brothers and sisters. Her family was not very wealthy, and so Cathelijn was made to wear Betje’s hand-me-down clothes. Sadly, Cathelijn was no less than three times bigger than her older sister. Cathelijn’s mother taught her to sew when she was six, and so Cathelijn would spend her afternoons sewing all her hand-me-down dresses together to make one big dress that was just the right size.
On her 13th birthday, Cathelijn’s family bought nine beautiful white horses, one for each of the family. They would be going on a holiday together and the horses were to be their mode of transport. Her brothers and sisters mounted their beasts with ease. Cathelijn struggled atop her horse, who, under her weight, stumbled forward a few paces and collapsed. As the animal lay dying on the ground, and her sisters giggled into their hands, her mother announced – “You’ll have to go and stay with your grandmother while we’re away”.
Grandma Gerdina was an artist, and her house was filled with paintings and drawings of flowers and faces. Her favourite thing to do, though, above all others, was to sculpt. Gerdina used clay and metal and dirt and dough and foodscraps to make her sculptures. Sometimes they would go in the garden and the birds would eat them. Other times she would pull them apart and make something else out of the same material. When Cathelijn arrived, Gerdina was sitting in her workshed, busying herself on her latest project – a giant viking ship, intricately carved from the wood of the trees in her garden. It was the size of a big dinner table, and had a wooden floor and a wooden mast and, on its nose, a big wooden dragon was roaring.
Every day for many weeks, Gerdina would work on the ship, carving away at its fine edges, whilst Cathelijn sat in the corner, making a viking helmet from the wood scraps her grandmother gave her. Gerdina would tell her granddaughter the story of Anke, a Viking warrior who commandeered her own ship and sailed the seas seeking adventure and exploring far off lands and places. She told her about the people Anke stole from, and the people she saved. And then she told her about how Anke died, and about how her family placed her body onto her boat and set it on fire before putting it out to sea.
One Saturday morning, Cathelijn got up to fix her grandmother some breakfast. She made eggs and tea and toast and put the whole meal on a big tray, like she usually did on Saturdays, and took it into her grandmother’s room.
But when Cathelijn went into Gerdina’s room, the old woman wasn’t sitting up like she usually was on a Saturday morning, planning her next project, surrounded by sketches. She didn’t have her notebook out, or her pencils, and she wasn’t propped up on two pillows, and her glasses weren’t perched gently on the edge of her nose, and she wasn’t smiling warmly. She was dead.
Cathelijn sat down on the bed and cried for a little while. Then she had a sip of her grandmother’s tea, and a bite of the toast, and a taste of the eggs. The toast was good, but the eggs weren’t very tasty at all, the sour berries adding a horrid flavour to the whole meal. After breakfast, Cathelijn busied herself around the house, cleaning and washing. She’d been thinking her grandmother would be dead soon, and so had been planning for it. A bag was packed under the bed, and a carefully chosen outfit hanging on the back of her bedroom door.
When the cleaning was finished, and the dishes were all washed, and the fire was well and truly out, Cathelijn decided it was time. She went to her room and pulled her travel bag from under the bed. She stripped down to her underclothes and got dressed again in the outfit she had chosen for this occasion.
She pushed the ship out of the workshop and into the yard, and then from the yard all the way down the hill to the edge of the forest, through the forest and into a clearing. She paused for a moment to catch her breath. Then out of the clearing and into more of the forest, and she kept pushing the whole time, until the sun was nearly setting. When she reached the water, the last golden rays of daylight were disappearing over the horizon. She cut open the cotton sack that she was dragging behind her and manoeuvred her grandmother’s stiff body onto the deck of the ship. Cathelijn took the viking helmet off her head and placed it gently on Gerdina’s, sweeping a few grey hairs off the old woman’s face. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a packet of matches, and she lit one and threw it onto the ship and pushed it out to sea. The fire smouldered for a little while, and then caught onto Gerdina’s cotton dress, and the flames got bigger and bigger, and the boat moved further out toward the horizon.
Three days earlier, in a bookstore in Zadar, I devour the shop's English-language section, the whole two shelves of it. My bags spill around me and I’m on the floor surrounded by books and magazines. I read everything, trying furiously to absorb it all, knowing I can’t afford to buy books and should really be looking for somewhere to sleep. I don’t look for somewhere to sleep, though. I buy six books instead. Six books by the same author, one of those series' about men and women and relationships and Labradors and the baby that brings them all together into one dysfunctional yet happy family who somehow manage to afford a warehouse loft conversion in Notting Hill while working part-time as writers or sculptors or graphic designers. The books aren't particularly highbrow, and after reading a few chapters I begin to wonder how they got published in the first place, but they're in English and I haven't heard or spoken English in a very long time, so I feel like these books, these six books, are going to save my life. I buy them, and as the cashier rings up the total I try and do the sums in my head - how much I spent minus the cost of dinner plus a cheap room multiplied by a packet of rolling tobacco equals I'm fucked. I've just fucked myself and all I have to show for it are six shit books.
On my way out of the store I spot a seventh. It’s a book of Beatles lyrics. It’s only five Euro and I’ve already spent so much money that it seems cheap. I dog-ear the songs we sang together and scribble a note on the inside cover. I tell myself that I'll post it later and now, sitting on the bus three days later with the lyric book in my hands, I promise myself again that at the next rest stop I will post it.
Kanat had two sets of drumsticks. One good pair and one bad pair. The bad pair were the colour of bleached bones, brittle and covered in chips and bruises. The good pair were red and robust, and so shiny that he could see his face in the reflection. Every day, after lessons had finished, the School Band would gather with the choir in the hall, and after they had tuned their instruments and warmed their voices, they would be silent. The bandmaster, Luba, a very tall, very thin man with jet black hair and a clean face, would sweep into the room and . He would conduct the band with a long metal baton that he would spend minutes shining before each rehearsal, while the band waited for him in silence. He would tap his music stand four times, nod curtly just once, and the band would play. Kanat drummed in perfect time, using his best red drumsticks. The choir would join in and sing about crimson scarves and marching toward victory. These were the only songs that the children were allowed to play and sing.
Each afternoon, halfway through rehearsal, Luba would raise his hands in a call for silence and announce a ten minute break. He would go outside the hall and smoke cigarettes in the cold air. When this hapenned, Kanat would do two things. Always two things, and always in the same order. First, he would loosen his tie. The others followed his lead. Then, he would collect from his schoolbag his brittle and bruised drumsticks. He would strike them together four times and begin to play. None of the children in the choir knew what the words to the songs meant, but Paul McCartney and John Lennon were known even in this small town. Luba would be gone for exactly four minutes, and the song went for three minutes and forty seconds, so if the group were quick enough, they could easily fit in a banned song before the break was over. But one day, the day on which this story is set, Luba came back early. The band members fell silent, one by one, as each of them in turn noticed the man's dark shape walking toward them. Kanat, though, with his eyes closed, continued to drum loudly and with wild abandon. When he finally noticed those around him had stopped playing, heopened his eyes. Kanat looked at Luba and Luba stared right back at Kanat.
Later that night, when Kanat was walking home, a group of men stepped out from behind a tree and hit the schoolboy with hammers until he bled. From then on, Kanat could only play drums with one hand.
Twenty-five years later, Kanat and his wife Elly and their friend, an Australian teenager, sit in a poky flat in north-west London, in a building full of grubby little people, on a street called Penny Lane. They drink vodka and water, and they tell him they don't know much about British music, so the boy pulls out his iPod and tells them he has to play them a song, a great song by this great band, a song that their street has got to be named after. Elly tries to stop him playing the song, but before she has a chance to say anything, Paul McCartney's voice is filling the small kitchen. The boy is singing and dancing, waving his arms above his head, but Elly is watching her husband. His eyes are filled with tears, and he is smiling from ear to ear.
I wake up somewhere just outside Split because I can feel something rustling against my legs, and my first thought, before I even open my eyes, is to pull my bag close to my chest and say a small prayer. Not a prayer, as such, but something like a prayer, a sort of wish, asked for with earnest. Please, always ask nicely, I’ve only got a few hundred kilometres to go. When I open my eyes, expecting the worst – expecting a knife, or a twisted smile or, at the very least, an old man in a trenchcoat – it’s not that bad at all. I open my eyes and instead of a murderer or a pervert or a robber, its just Piotr, and he’s got a little photo album, and he’s pointing. Piotr is the guy who has been sitting next to me since we left Dubvrovnik, the Polish guy who talks with a heavy accent, has a cleft lip and no teeth. I can’t understand most of what he says. He keeps talking to me, though, and I keep nodding earnestly. He shows me a scar on his arm, and explains that it came from the piece of glass that pierced him when the train next to his on the Underground exploded. I show him a scar on my eyebrow from when Lachlan Bull smacked me in the head with a Transformer when I was seven.
While I struggle to understand why this man I don’t know would wake me up to show me photos of other people I don’t know, he starts talking with his heavy accent and I just start nodding. He’s pointing at a picture of a house, and then of a tree, and then of a barn, and then of that same barn on fire. He keeps flicking through the pictures and pointing and muttering something about each of them, and I keep nodding, and then he stops. He stops on a picture that looks a lot like most of the other pictures, just craggy countryside and broken buildings. But then I see the little black ball on the ground, the mangy little puppy dog sleeping on a rock with his little puppy eyes closed tight against the wind. Piotr doesn’t say anything for a minute, just looks at the picture, and then he turns the page and there’s another barn with its roof on fire.
Piotr Gabka was a simple man with simple tastes. He had a vegetable that grew just enough leafy vegetables for tomorrow night’s dinner. His house was little and clean and, though lacking a woman’s touch, was always warm with the fire carefully stoked.
Every day he would go walking through his fields, admiring the trees and the flowers. One day, Piotr was out walking in one of the furthest fields in the west, where the horizon was interrupted only by a row of tall paperbark trees, and a run-down wooden building once used to keep hay. He loved this part of his property because, although it was particularly wild, it was still beautiful. He rarely walked there because the paths had become covered with weeds and the angry roots of old trees, so it was no longer safe. It was the only piece of land he couldn’t see from his kitchen window.
While he was there, walking, he found a small pup lying in the sun, gnawing on an old chicken bone. The pup was lean and short-haired, with ears that stuck straight up in the air. The pup froze and stared at the old man a second, before resuming work on the bone. Piotr reached into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of bread he was keeping as a snack. The puppy ran over and snatched it away, chewing on it until his mouth was covered in foam. Piot patted the dog goodnight and scurried home.
The next day, Piotr went back with some more bread. The puppy ate it all up. The day after that he went back again, this time with some vegetables from the garden, all chopped up and cooked in a stew. Piot visited the puppy on its patch of land every day for many many months, until the puppy grew into a dog. Every day, without fail, the pair would meet by the rock, Piotr always carring a plate full of food which the dog devoured as if starving. Every day Piotr got a little thinner as the food he saved for himself became less and less. Soon all he ate for dinner was a cup of sweet tea and yesterday’s bread. Piotr didn’t mind, though. He felt best when lying in bed at night, a dull hunger inside him, in the knowledge that his friend was sleeping somewhere on a full stomach. He looked forward to seeing him every day, and every day the dog was there.
Except one day, when it wasn’t. It was gone. Piotr called to it and waited for several hours, until the sun was down. The dog never came. It stayed away for three nights, and then, as suddenly as it had disappeared, it was back, and this time with a friend. Piotr saw the friends for the first time as he approached the rock. A second black body was lying, stretched out on the grass. Piotr had continued to arrive at their meeting place each night in the hope that the dog would return. As Piotr approached the dogs, they both stood to attention. From inside the belly of the boy, he heard a low growl. Teeth bared and eyes white, they both started barking loudly, snapping their jaws at the old man. Piotr dropped the terracotta bowl he was carrying, and the dogs’ food sprayed everywhere. Then, as Piotr took one small step back, the dogs leapt. They grabbed at the old man’s clothes, nipping at his heels and biting at his hands. Piotr turned to run and the dogs chased him, barking madly. Eventually, when Piotr was wheezing from running, and his hands bloody from the bites, he stopped and turned to look at the animals. They had walked back to their rock, and stood on its top, starting back at him. Piotr limped back to the house.
Gripping the bus’s address system with one hammy fist, the driver clears her voice and announces that Thankyou for using Samborcek Buses and it has been a pleasure driving us and we are nearing our final stop and could everyone please could collect their bags and rubbish etc. She switches off the microphone and pulls her raggedy old shawl tight around her shoulders.
Our last stop is Zagreb airport. I hope they have nice toilets. A whole lot of people got off at the previous stop, my Polish friend included. He patted me on the head and insisted I was a Good Boy, and then left. I’m getting closer, now. I pack up my books and magazines and iPod and put my journal in my bag. The woman next to me is napping on her husband's shoulder. His eyes watch the road in front, and the headphones in his ears play the same song over and over again, his walkman nestled in the palm of his twisted and broken hand.
But the bus never gets to where it’s going. We only fall short by about 20km, which is a pretty good effort considering the age and condition of the bus. But then again it wouldn’t have mattered if we got halfway or only ten minutes down the road, because either way we never got where we were going. An old man being chased by a dog runs in front of the bus, and we swerve to miss him, but we hit him anyway. The man is tossed against a tree and he dies, and then the bus, which is going quite fast at the time, plows through the road barrier and sails over the edge of the cliff and bursts into flames. The dog, a mangy thing riddled with fleas, wags its tail furiously and sticks its head out over the edge, looking down at the mess of flames and twisted metal. He turns around three times, does a wee, and then runs off in the direction of the mountains.
land/horses.
This piece was written in 2007. I used music lyrics to try and help tell the story.
land/horses
When suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he's being surrounded by
Horses, horses, horses, horses,
Coming in in all directions,
White shining silver studs with their nose in flames.
Land – Patti Smith
-
1
There’s a full moon in the sky and Tom’s entire street is lit up by it. He’s lying on the bit of roof that sticks out next to his bedroom window wearing only his underpants. It’s a little after midnight and the cool wind brushes over his body. Tom arches his back and rubs his hands up his torso. When he presses firmly against his skin, he can feel his bones, floating around just under the surface. He traces his ribs up his side, like piano keys, pressing on each of them, gently, in turn. He begins to hum softly, bringing the sound up from inside him, his entire body resonating against the cooling terracotta tiles.
Inside Tom’s bedroom, the needle on an old record player drops and the machine creaks into action. There’s the familiar sound of static before piano notes begin to spill out of the window. The tips of Tom’s fingers come alive.
Why you wanna fly, blackbird?
You ain't ever gonna fly.
No place big enough for holding
all the tears you're gonna cry.
When Tom’s grandmother died, his father was charged with the task of cleaning out her house. Tom found a crate of old Nina Simone records in the skip, which his father had tossed aside. He now keeps the records hidden in a box under his bed.
The wind has turned cold and Tom can feel his skin begin to tighten against it. By now his fingers and toes are like bits of porcelain, and each exhalation forms a little cloud in front of his face. He enjoys this, feeling the blood move from his extremities towards his middle, as if bit by bit his body is shutting itself down. The song floats over and around him, and he breathes it in with every breath.
The dog next door barks loudly into the night, staccato, and the sound echoes around the quiet street. When he was young he spent his afternoons at his grandmother’s house, spreadeagled on her living room floor, surrounded by records. He would lie there and study the pictures, tracing his fingers over the faces of artists long since dead. Nina Simone was his grandmother’s favourite, and she would play Tom her songs as he stared at her picture, her dark, dimpled cheeks wet with tears and sweat, her face and body contorted so she looked like a wounded animal.
Tom’s heart beats hard and fast in his chest as the song reaches its climax and his body writhes, illuminated by the moonlight. The song ends, and the needle lifts, settling back in its cradle. Tom’s heart rate slows and his breathing returns to normal.
After a time, he sits up, carefully peeling himself off the roof. His ample flesh has melted into the grooves of the tiles. Stepping through the open window and back into his room, Tom draws the curtains behind him. The smell of incense is heavy, and the only light in the room comes from the bedside lamp. It casts deep shadows across Tom’s face. His eyes retreat into their sockets and his cheeks are hollow.
Tom stands in front of his wardrobe mirror, naked, and stares at his white body. Running his fingers along his torso, he plays dot-to-dot with the moles that trace their way up his side, starting somewhere near his hip and ending in the tuft of hair under his arm. Long bony fingers pass over his ribs, visible when he sucks his stomach in, and when he presses down he can hear soft notes coming from somewhere inside of him. He hums while he examines his body, and a smile creeps across his lips.
He notices them when he puts on his t-shirt. They press out of his back on to the fabric. Two perfectly round lumps, no bigger than a coin, one on each shoulder blade. The skin is sensitive and tingles under the pressure of the thin cotton.
2
Blue
Songs are like tattoos
You know I’ve been to sea before
Crown and anchor me
Or let me sail away
The room is small, smells like cleaning fluid and ammonia, and is dully lit by fluorescent lights. The tattoo artist’s name is Helena. She is short and round, wearing a tight black singlet and pink lips. Inked on her chubby forearm is a black stallion, rearing up on its hind legs.
“Have you eaten anything today?”
Tom shakes his head.
“Good. It’s better if you do this on an empty stomach.”
Tom hears the buzz of the drill, and his heart catches in his throat. Helena works quickly and deftly, whistling as she goes. He stares up at the ceiling, his ears filled with the sound of the pin pressing against his flesh and the girl’s gentle refrain.
Hey Blue
Here is a song for you
Ink on a pin
Underneath the skin
An empty space to fill in
When she’s done, he glances down at his wrist. Snaking their way up from his hand towards his elbow are a string of words, lyrics to his grandmother’s favourite song, wrapped around his arm like vines. Tom flexes the muscles in his arm and the words move. The girl smiles at him.
“It looks like they’re dancing.”
Tom pauses at the front door of the shop, looking out at the overcast street. An old jacket of his father’s hangs from his frame, creating a huge mass inside of which his body disappears.
That night Tom lies in bed, a dull ache forming inside him, his breath shallow with anticipation. He can feel the empty space where food would usually sit, and, sucking in his stomach, he counts two extra ribs.
3
The hair doesn’t come off the way he expects it to. It collects in clumps and clogs the head of the electric shaver, which has never been cleaned. He starts at the back of his head and moves forward, trying to work in some sort of order, but soon he is running the clippers over his scalp in all directions, back and forth. Hair falls on his bare shoulders and carpets the tiles around his feet. He works quickly and methodically, the buzz of the shaver echoing around the small bathroom.
The yellow light picks up the tiny crucifix hanging around his neck. An unwanted birthday present from years before, it now sits over his chest, burning itself onto his skin. His grandmother had it engraved with a few small words from Psalm 30, words that come to him now as the tap in the sink drips, rhythmic and steady.
You have turned my mourning into dancing.
You have removed my sack cloth, and clothed me with gladness.
And now my heart, silent no longer, will play you music.
He clicks the shaver off and rubs his hand over the light fuzz that now covers his scalp. Craning his neck, he studies the new tattoos that now creep up from his torso. His diminutive frame gets lost in the huge mirror.
He presses his hand against his sternum and feels his heart beating inside his chest. The lumps on his back are throbbing, now, in time with his heartbeat. He wiggles his big toe and presses the ball of his left foot hard against the ground, pushing against the cool tiles. His body rises slowly and he hovers there, about four inches from the ground, for a matter of seconds, before he drops again and lands softly on a bed of his own hair.
4
The fifth time Tom visits the tattoo parlour, Helena asks him out for a drink.
Her room is messy, the carpet covered in clothes and dirty underpants. Old movie posters are falling off the walls and, by the desk, a pile of CDs is getting ready to collapse. A heavy silence hangs over the room as he slowly removes his clothes and settles onto her bed. His eyes are heavy and fingers cold.
Helena slips off her skirt, exposing leagues of alabaster skin and dimples over her knees. She moves onto the bed, the springs creaking under her, and sits astride Tom. His empty eyes look up at her full breasts. Tucking a strand of flyaway hair behind her ear, she settles into a gentle rocking, eyes closed tight. Tom watches her body move over him, the flesh on her belly clean and white. He presses his bony hands into her. The skin turns bright red where his fingers had just been. Helena shifts, uncomfortable, Tom’s hipbones like blunt weapons digging into her legs. She breathes heavily and little beads of sweat collect on her upper lip. Not a sound escapes Tom’s closed mouth.
After, when the room is quiet again, she leans over and fumbles in her bedside drawer and produces a poorly rolled joint. Tom watches her as she moves, the way her flesh collects on her round hips, settling under her breasts. She lights it with a match, and the acrid smell of sulphur burns Tom’s nostrils. She inhales deeply and clouds of smoke roll around them as they lie there.
“Some music?” It’s not really a question, and once again Helena leans over, pressing play on the stereo. George Harrison’s voice spills out from the speakers and fills the empty room.
Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting
Little darling, it seems like years since it's been clear
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun,
And I say it's all right
Tom stirs from his half-sleep. Lyrics dance in and out of his ears and his heart swells. The music notes tattooed on his chest begin to heave as his breathing picks up. Reaching for Helena with long hands, he moves on top of her, roughly pinning her arms above her head. She stares up at him with her pink lips, and his eyes sparkle as he pushes against her. Helena’s legs wrap around his waist, pinning her body to his. Her mouth tastes sweet and the air is thick with smoke, damp breath and music.
5
The bath fills slowly, steam clouding the small room. The air is thick and silky, and Tom can feel it pressing heavily against his lungs. Running his hands through the water, he creates waves and currents that rock his body from side to side like a tiny, weathered boat. He dips his head below the surface, the rush of water filling his ears. His heart leaps in to his throat. For a moment he’s lost, underwater. His skinny arms rest by his side, suspended, floating. All sounds are heightened. He can hear the dripping tap, the swell of the water, his heartbeat echoing in his ears.
He sits up again, pushing out of the water like molasses. There’s a knock at the door. Shakily, he steps from the bath and engulfs himself with a towel. He opens the creaky door and there, sitting on the carpeted floor, is a plate of chocolate biscuits. At the end of the corridor, his little sister sits, her hands pressed against her ears, quietly humming a song with her eyes clenched shut.
6
Tom lies flat on his stomach and stares at the cracked green wall next to him. His body is shrunken and knobbly, his vertebrae running down his back like keys on a xylophone. Outside, a storm rages, and he can hear the rain hammering down on the roof. There’s the familiar smell of sweat and cleaning fluid and the fluorescent light above his head flickers.
Helena wipes Tom’s back with an antiseptic cloth, her chubby fingers lingering over the lumps on his protruding shoulder blades. The skin on her hand tingles, and she can feel the heat radiating from the strange growths. Snapping on a pair of cheap disposable gloves, she dips the head of the drill in a little palette of ink. Silently, she begins her work, filling up the last section of bare skin on Tom’s back. The buzz of the drill sliding quickly over his shoulders echoes around the parlour. He’s used to the feel of the pin against his body now, the way it scrapes into his flesh. She doesn’t work from a picture this time, or from the poor verbal instructions Tom has given her in the past. This time he just pointed at her arm and lay down.
She begins with the head, long and dark, crowned with a mane of thick hair like flames. Tom can feel her trace the outline of the horse’s thick legs, its powerful hooves pressing firmly against his back. This last piece of untouched skin is quickly filled, breathing black and heavy. The stallion rears up on its hind legs, nostrils flared, eyed white and wild, the image framed by the dull and exposed bones of Tom’s spine.
Tom stands and arches his back, straining his neck towards the sky. His breath is short, palms sweaty, his nervousness and anticipation barely contained. Now that the last piece of the jigsaw is complete, he’s ready.
7
With less flesh to cover, the skin on Tom’s body has begun to sag, his collection of tattoos warping their way around his body. They flow freely in and out of one another, music notes obscuring words obscuring treble clefs. His body has become a wonky maze of lines and words, quavers, semitones, every inch of his torso covered in dark ink.
The room is familiar. He’s been here before, many times. The smell of cleaning fluid lingers in his nostrils even between visits. It’s typically silent, the sounds of soft breathing coming from behind drawn curtains, of footsteps echoing down corridors, the only interruption. He has trouble moving now, and needs help getting to his feet. In the bed opposite him is a young girl with heavy eyes. She wears pyjamas, patterned with tiny green unicorns, and stares at her hands with anticipation.
Tom stares up at the ceiling, his eyes wide. The room is silent but his ears are full of music. He can see through the plaster and the bricks, through the fourth, fifth and sixth stories of the hospital, out into the city, up into the clouds.
The doctor said his heart was weak, but he can feel it now, buried his chest. From inside its cage, the beat begins, slowly gaining momentum. Tom starts to move again. His fingers dance along his chest, pressing against his ribs, notes of music spilling out of him. From behind, Tom can feel the lumps on his shoulder blades pressing against the bed, something inside clawing to get out. He stands, unaided, and pulls the standard issue blue robe from around his body. Reaching under his pillow for the mirror he’s not meant to have, it takes him a moment to locate his face. Seeing his reflection, his heart lurches. A smile creeps across his lips. Almost there. His eyes have sunk back into their sockets, his cheeks hollowed out.
Tom closes his eyes and breathes deeply, pressing his fingers against the keys on his chest, by now an entire orchestra of music emanating from his skinny white body. The pressure in his back continues to rise and he lifts his head toward the sky, mouth opening in pain as he feels the pressure on his spine build and build. Tears prick at his eyes and he tries to scream, but instead of cries of pain comes a chorus of music. His body twists and his face contorts, salty tears streaming down his cheeks. As if being pulled upward by strings, Tom’s body rises gently into the air, his toes hanging just above the sticky linoleum floor. Finally he feels the skin on his shoulder blades rip open, blood spilling down his back, and from inside him grows a pair of enormous white wings. Tom takes flight, moving up through the ceiling, through the different wards of the hospital, his eyes fixed above him, towards the sky. He squints into the sun, which beats down on him, bathing him in hot yellow light. His giant wings whip the afternoon into frenzy as the sound of music swells and grows and fills the silence around him.
-
Blue, here is a shell for you
Inside you’ll hear a sigh
A foggy lullaby
There is your song from me.
land/horses
Horses, horses, horses, horses,
Coming in in all directions,
White shining silver studs with their nose in flames.
Land – Patti Smith
-
1
There’s a full moon in the sky and Tom’s entire street is lit up by it. He’s lying on the bit of roof that sticks out next to his bedroom window wearing only his underpants. It’s a little after midnight and the cool wind brushes over his body. Tom arches his back and rubs his hands up his torso. When he presses firmly against his skin, he can feel his bones, floating around just under the surface. He traces his ribs up his side, like piano keys, pressing on each of them, gently, in turn. He begins to hum softly, bringing the sound up from inside him, his entire body resonating against the cooling terracotta tiles.
Inside Tom’s bedroom, the needle on an old record player drops and the machine creaks into action. There’s the familiar sound of static before piano notes begin to spill out of the window. The tips of Tom’s fingers come alive.
Why you wanna fly, blackbird?
You ain't ever gonna fly.
No place big enough for holding
all the tears you're gonna cry.
When Tom’s grandmother died, his father was charged with the task of cleaning out her house. Tom found a crate of old Nina Simone records in the skip, which his father had tossed aside. He now keeps the records hidden in a box under his bed.
The wind has turned cold and Tom can feel his skin begin to tighten against it. By now his fingers and toes are like bits of porcelain, and each exhalation forms a little cloud in front of his face. He enjoys this, feeling the blood move from his extremities towards his middle, as if bit by bit his body is shutting itself down. The song floats over and around him, and he breathes it in with every breath.
The dog next door barks loudly into the night, staccato, and the sound echoes around the quiet street. When he was young he spent his afternoons at his grandmother’s house, spreadeagled on her living room floor, surrounded by records. He would lie there and study the pictures, tracing his fingers over the faces of artists long since dead. Nina Simone was his grandmother’s favourite, and she would play Tom her songs as he stared at her picture, her dark, dimpled cheeks wet with tears and sweat, her face and body contorted so she looked like a wounded animal.
Tom’s heart beats hard and fast in his chest as the song reaches its climax and his body writhes, illuminated by the moonlight. The song ends, and the needle lifts, settling back in its cradle. Tom’s heart rate slows and his breathing returns to normal.
After a time, he sits up, carefully peeling himself off the roof. His ample flesh has melted into the grooves of the tiles. Stepping through the open window and back into his room, Tom draws the curtains behind him. The smell of incense is heavy, and the only light in the room comes from the bedside lamp. It casts deep shadows across Tom’s face. His eyes retreat into their sockets and his cheeks are hollow.
Tom stands in front of his wardrobe mirror, naked, and stares at his white body. Running his fingers along his torso, he plays dot-to-dot with the moles that trace their way up his side, starting somewhere near his hip and ending in the tuft of hair under his arm. Long bony fingers pass over his ribs, visible when he sucks his stomach in, and when he presses down he can hear soft notes coming from somewhere inside of him. He hums while he examines his body, and a smile creeps across his lips.
He notices them when he puts on his t-shirt. They press out of his back on to the fabric. Two perfectly round lumps, no bigger than a coin, one on each shoulder blade. The skin is sensitive and tingles under the pressure of the thin cotton.
2
Blue
Songs are like tattoos
You know I’ve been to sea before
Crown and anchor me
Or let me sail away
The room is small, smells like cleaning fluid and ammonia, and is dully lit by fluorescent lights. The tattoo artist’s name is Helena. She is short and round, wearing a tight black singlet and pink lips. Inked on her chubby forearm is a black stallion, rearing up on its hind legs.
“Have you eaten anything today?”
Tom shakes his head.
“Good. It’s better if you do this on an empty stomach.”
Tom hears the buzz of the drill, and his heart catches in his throat. Helena works quickly and deftly, whistling as she goes. He stares up at the ceiling, his ears filled with the sound of the pin pressing against his flesh and the girl’s gentle refrain.
Hey Blue
Here is a song for you
Ink on a pin
Underneath the skin
An empty space to fill in
When she’s done, he glances down at his wrist. Snaking their way up from his hand towards his elbow are a string of words, lyrics to his grandmother’s favourite song, wrapped around his arm like vines. Tom flexes the muscles in his arm and the words move. The girl smiles at him.
“It looks like they’re dancing.”
Tom pauses at the front door of the shop, looking out at the overcast street. An old jacket of his father’s hangs from his frame, creating a huge mass inside of which his body disappears.
That night Tom lies in bed, a dull ache forming inside him, his breath shallow with anticipation. He can feel the empty space where food would usually sit, and, sucking in his stomach, he counts two extra ribs.
3
The hair doesn’t come off the way he expects it to. It collects in clumps and clogs the head of the electric shaver, which has never been cleaned. He starts at the back of his head and moves forward, trying to work in some sort of order, but soon he is running the clippers over his scalp in all directions, back and forth. Hair falls on his bare shoulders and carpets the tiles around his feet. He works quickly and methodically, the buzz of the shaver echoing around the small bathroom.
The yellow light picks up the tiny crucifix hanging around his neck. An unwanted birthday present from years before, it now sits over his chest, burning itself onto his skin. His grandmother had it engraved with a few small words from Psalm 30, words that come to him now as the tap in the sink drips, rhythmic and steady.
You have turned my mourning into dancing.
You have removed my sack cloth, and clothed me with gladness.
And now my heart, silent no longer, will play you music.
He clicks the shaver off and rubs his hand over the light fuzz that now covers his scalp. Craning his neck, he studies the new tattoos that now creep up from his torso. His diminutive frame gets lost in the huge mirror.
He presses his hand against his sternum and feels his heart beating inside his chest. The lumps on his back are throbbing, now, in time with his heartbeat. He wiggles his big toe and presses the ball of his left foot hard against the ground, pushing against the cool tiles. His body rises slowly and he hovers there, about four inches from the ground, for a matter of seconds, before he drops again and lands softly on a bed of his own hair.
4
The fifth time Tom visits the tattoo parlour, Helena asks him out for a drink.
Her room is messy, the carpet covered in clothes and dirty underpants. Old movie posters are falling off the walls and, by the desk, a pile of CDs is getting ready to collapse. A heavy silence hangs over the room as he slowly removes his clothes and settles onto her bed. His eyes are heavy and fingers cold.
Helena slips off her skirt, exposing leagues of alabaster skin and dimples over her knees. She moves onto the bed, the springs creaking under her, and sits astride Tom. His empty eyes look up at her full breasts. Tucking a strand of flyaway hair behind her ear, she settles into a gentle rocking, eyes closed tight. Tom watches her body move over him, the flesh on her belly clean and white. He presses his bony hands into her. The skin turns bright red where his fingers had just been. Helena shifts, uncomfortable, Tom’s hipbones like blunt weapons digging into her legs. She breathes heavily and little beads of sweat collect on her upper lip. Not a sound escapes Tom’s closed mouth.
After, when the room is quiet again, she leans over and fumbles in her bedside drawer and produces a poorly rolled joint. Tom watches her as she moves, the way her flesh collects on her round hips, settling under her breasts. She lights it with a match, and the acrid smell of sulphur burns Tom’s nostrils. She inhales deeply and clouds of smoke roll around them as they lie there.
“Some music?” It’s not really a question, and once again Helena leans over, pressing play on the stereo. George Harrison’s voice spills out from the speakers and fills the empty room.
Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting
Little darling, it seems like years since it's been clear
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun,
And I say it's all right
Tom stirs from his half-sleep. Lyrics dance in and out of his ears and his heart swells. The music notes tattooed on his chest begin to heave as his breathing picks up. Reaching for Helena with long hands, he moves on top of her, roughly pinning her arms above her head. She stares up at him with her pink lips, and his eyes sparkle as he pushes against her. Helena’s legs wrap around his waist, pinning her body to his. Her mouth tastes sweet and the air is thick with smoke, damp breath and music.
5
The bath fills slowly, steam clouding the small room. The air is thick and silky, and Tom can feel it pressing heavily against his lungs. Running his hands through the water, he creates waves and currents that rock his body from side to side like a tiny, weathered boat. He dips his head below the surface, the rush of water filling his ears. His heart leaps in to his throat. For a moment he’s lost, underwater. His skinny arms rest by his side, suspended, floating. All sounds are heightened. He can hear the dripping tap, the swell of the water, his heartbeat echoing in his ears.
He sits up again, pushing out of the water like molasses. There’s a knock at the door. Shakily, he steps from the bath and engulfs himself with a towel. He opens the creaky door and there, sitting on the carpeted floor, is a plate of chocolate biscuits. At the end of the corridor, his little sister sits, her hands pressed against her ears, quietly humming a song with her eyes clenched shut.
6
Tom lies flat on his stomach and stares at the cracked green wall next to him. His body is shrunken and knobbly, his vertebrae running down his back like keys on a xylophone. Outside, a storm rages, and he can hear the rain hammering down on the roof. There’s the familiar smell of sweat and cleaning fluid and the fluorescent light above his head flickers.
Helena wipes Tom’s back with an antiseptic cloth, her chubby fingers lingering over the lumps on his protruding shoulder blades. The skin on her hand tingles, and she can feel the heat radiating from the strange growths. Snapping on a pair of cheap disposable gloves, she dips the head of the drill in a little palette of ink. Silently, she begins her work, filling up the last section of bare skin on Tom’s back. The buzz of the drill sliding quickly over his shoulders echoes around the parlour. He’s used to the feel of the pin against his body now, the way it scrapes into his flesh. She doesn’t work from a picture this time, or from the poor verbal instructions Tom has given her in the past. This time he just pointed at her arm and lay down.
She begins with the head, long and dark, crowned with a mane of thick hair like flames. Tom can feel her trace the outline of the horse’s thick legs, its powerful hooves pressing firmly against his back. This last piece of untouched skin is quickly filled, breathing black and heavy. The stallion rears up on its hind legs, nostrils flared, eyed white and wild, the image framed by the dull and exposed bones of Tom’s spine.
Tom stands and arches his back, straining his neck towards the sky. His breath is short, palms sweaty, his nervousness and anticipation barely contained. Now that the last piece of the jigsaw is complete, he’s ready.
7
With less flesh to cover, the skin on Tom’s body has begun to sag, his collection of tattoos warping their way around his body. They flow freely in and out of one another, music notes obscuring words obscuring treble clefs. His body has become a wonky maze of lines and words, quavers, semitones, every inch of his torso covered in dark ink.
The room is familiar. He’s been here before, many times. The smell of cleaning fluid lingers in his nostrils even between visits. It’s typically silent, the sounds of soft breathing coming from behind drawn curtains, of footsteps echoing down corridors, the only interruption. He has trouble moving now, and needs help getting to his feet. In the bed opposite him is a young girl with heavy eyes. She wears pyjamas, patterned with tiny green unicorns, and stares at her hands with anticipation.
Tom stares up at the ceiling, his eyes wide. The room is silent but his ears are full of music. He can see through the plaster and the bricks, through the fourth, fifth and sixth stories of the hospital, out into the city, up into the clouds.
The doctor said his heart was weak, but he can feel it now, buried his chest. From inside its cage, the beat begins, slowly gaining momentum. Tom starts to move again. His fingers dance along his chest, pressing against his ribs, notes of music spilling out of him. From behind, Tom can feel the lumps on his shoulder blades pressing against the bed, something inside clawing to get out. He stands, unaided, and pulls the standard issue blue robe from around his body. Reaching under his pillow for the mirror he’s not meant to have, it takes him a moment to locate his face. Seeing his reflection, his heart lurches. A smile creeps across his lips. Almost there. His eyes have sunk back into their sockets, his cheeks hollowed out.
Tom closes his eyes and breathes deeply, pressing his fingers against the keys on his chest, by now an entire orchestra of music emanating from his skinny white body. The pressure in his back continues to rise and he lifts his head toward the sky, mouth opening in pain as he feels the pressure on his spine build and build. Tears prick at his eyes and he tries to scream, but instead of cries of pain comes a chorus of music. His body twists and his face contorts, salty tears streaming down his cheeks. As if being pulled upward by strings, Tom’s body rises gently into the air, his toes hanging just above the sticky linoleum floor. Finally he feels the skin on his shoulder blades rip open, blood spilling down his back, and from inside him grows a pair of enormous white wings. Tom takes flight, moving up through the ceiling, through the different wards of the hospital, his eyes fixed above him, towards the sky. He squints into the sun, which beats down on him, bathing him in hot yellow light. His giant wings whip the afternoon into frenzy as the sound of music swells and grows and fills the silence around him.
Blue, here is a shell for you
Inside you’ll hear a sigh
A foggy lullaby
There is your song from me.
beautiful father.
This piece was written in 2005. It relied on adopting the style of another author, and using part of their work to inspire your own. Olga Masters' short story 'Call Me Pinkie' was my starting point.
Beautiful Father
“The back of his neck was creased beautifully like a doll’s pleated skirt. When he moved the pleats deepened. His hair grew in and our of his collar touching him lovingly. He made some nice little gentle grunts. My blouse felt too tight for my skinny chest, my throat too tight to swallow…”
- from Olga Masters’ ‘Call Me Pinkie’.
Father glanced up at the house, black against the darkening sky, and swatted a few stray flies from his face. The tall grass and flowers that grew wild along the fence-line, masking the view to the road, rustled in the suddenly cool breeze. Hesitating for a moment, Father walked around the back of the house to the woodshed. He could hear someone inside, and turned the corner to see Nancy, back to him, her hands scrubbing fiercely at a pair of pants with a cake of crumbling yellow soap. She started and turned to face him, a smile spreading quickly across her skinny face.
“Oh Father!” Her voice quavered slightly as she spoke.
A moment later, he greeted her with a broad smile.
“Hullo, Pinkie!” he chuckled, using the name he had given her at birth. “Little washerwoman Pinkie.” Her pale eyes bore into his, her eyebrows standing to attention.
The smile fell from Father’s face as he sat down in the doorway and he groaned slightly, the taut muscles in his back stretching with the movement. He wearily lifted his heavy feet; his boots caked with red clay from the road works. Pinkie watched him as he worked, hypnotised by the rhythmic unlacing of his boots. The wind cooled her burning cheeks and she blinked furiously, turning once more to face the washtub. Father glanced at the sky, watching the dirty smudges of yellow stars that had begun to appear in the distance. Behind him, Pinkie’s choked voice was breaking the silence.
“Mother’s not sick,” she said earnestly. “She’s getting the tea.”
Father was suddenly cold and the hairs on his arms stood to attention. His gaze fell on the house. Its flaky white paint was peeling around the windowsills, the garden beds a mess of scraggy bushes and wild geraniums. Vines clawed their way up the outside walls, choking out other plants. An open-air veranda fenced in three sides of the house and it was from here that Mother would watch the partially obscured road for hours on end, waiting for a rare passing car to break the silence. At the sound of an engine in the distance, her eyes would become glassy and her face taut, a small smile creeping out at the edges of her lips. Hands gripping the veranda, knuckles white, she would peer out between the rows of May bushes that ran along the fenceline, hoping to catch a glimpse of the car’s shiny duco. But as the cars would pass by the house, leaving in their wake a cloud of brown dust, Mother’s eyes would lose their shine, her hands would become limp again, and her face would settle back into its lines.
”I’ll have to go inside soon,” Father said softly into the stillness. His brown face was creased like leather.
“When I’ve washed the pants I’ll come too,” Pinkie answered loudly. Her voice echoed, staccato, into the darkness. The muscles in her arms twitched involuntarily, like dogs nipping at the heels of strangers. Father showed no sign of having heard her. Standing quickly, he brushed the dirt off the back of his pants and turned toward the house.
Evening had fallen, and the sky stretched bleakly away toward the mountains. Father paused a moment before pushing into the house, running the corns on his hands over the rough and rusty door handle. The old kitchen door screeched loudly as he entered, and slammed shut behind him. The house was cold, dark. Breakfast things were still messily spread over the small kitchen table, and one of the children had emptied the saucepan cupboard of its contents.
“The fire’s out,” a stony voice said from the darkness.
Father turned to see his wife standing in the doorway, her thinning muslin dress loose on her skinny frame. She often moved like that, silent and swift, through the rooms of their small house. Her hollow cheeks gave her the appearance of having constantly pursed lips.
“Hullo Pearlie,” Father said, leaning forward to place a kiss on her cold cheek. She flicked her grey eyes up at him and his heart sank. Little Eric, naked but for a singlet, ran in and threw his arms around Father’s weak knees.
“G’day sport,” Father said, ruffling the boy’s hair.
“The fire’s out. Nancy said she was getting the wood.” Mother moved to the kitchen bench. Outside, Father could hear Nancy’s soft whistling as she washed the pants.
“You know Pinkie’s too small to chop the wood. She can’t get the fire going,” he replied. He glanced at the stove, and it was dead black.
“It’s always ‘Pinkie’,” Mother sneered, spittle forming at the corners of her mouth.
In the bedroom, newly born Clem woke up from his nap and began to cry. Mother let out an exasperated sigh and tears began pricking at her eyes. Glaring at Father, she picked up a teacup and threw it to the floor. Small pieces of china shattered into all corners of the kitchen. Eric began to wail loudly, and clung tighter to his father, who could only look on blankly. Father gripped Eric’s arm tightly, to stop him cutting open his tiny feet and dragging blood through the house. Mother then joined in Eric’s cry with one of her own. Together with Clem, the three of them were like the instruments of a human orchestra, dull and relentless in their song.
“You don’t know! Nancy said she was getting the wood!” Mother flew to the couch, hurtling herself on it and pulling at her unkempt hair with her hands. She rolled her head back and forth on the arm, moaning and weeping. Clem’s shrill cries cut across his brother’s snivelling and his mother’s moans. Tears welled in Father’s eyes. He roughly snapped Eric from his leg and pushed him to the floor, causing him to shriek louder. Father’s face was ugly in the dark light of the cold kitchen, jagged creases forming around his lips and eyes. He pushed open the back door and hurtled down the steps into the woodshed. “Go inside,” he called to Pinkie. He fetched an axe from the workbench. “Inside!” he snapped again. “The fire’s dead out. You had to get wood for the stove!”
“Oh, Father, I know!” Pinkie wailed.
Father began splitting damp wood with hard quick blows, sending pieces flying everywhere. He looked at his daughter, standing there in her dirty clothes. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes moist. His heart lurched and he desperately wanted to hug her. “Inside at once! Nancy!” He growled the last word. It sounded so foreign, coming from his lips, ‘Nancy’. His big arms stretched toward the sky, axe in hand, before he ripped them back to earth, scattering bits of wood in his wake. Pinkie’s lips formed words but her throat wouldn’t speak. The chop of her father’s axe was the beat to her mother’s wailing inside. Pinkie stood still on the back step whilst a bitter wind whipped the evening into frenzy. Father looked over his shoulder at her. He was panting now. Separated by blocks of firewood, Pinkie’s eyes met Father’s. After a moment’s hesitation she turned toward the house, her gaze falling to the ground, the blows of the axe echoing in her ears.
There was a wind, too, one of those winds that come with evening, a wind with a breath of warmth from the day just gone and a chilly edge warning of worse to come.
References
Masters, Olga (1996) Collected Stories, University of Queensland Press, Queensland.
Beautiful Father
“The back of his neck was creased beautifully like a doll’s pleated skirt. When he moved the pleats deepened. His hair grew in and our of his collar touching him lovingly. He made some nice little gentle grunts. My blouse felt too tight for my skinny chest, my throat too tight to swallow…”
- from Olga Masters’ ‘Call Me Pinkie’.
Father glanced up at the house, black against the darkening sky, and swatted a few stray flies from his face. The tall grass and flowers that grew wild along the fence-line, masking the view to the road, rustled in the suddenly cool breeze. Hesitating for a moment, Father walked around the back of the house to the woodshed. He could hear someone inside, and turned the corner to see Nancy, back to him, her hands scrubbing fiercely at a pair of pants with a cake of crumbling yellow soap. She started and turned to face him, a smile spreading quickly across her skinny face.
“Oh Father!” Her voice quavered slightly as she spoke.
A moment later, he greeted her with a broad smile.
“Hullo, Pinkie!” he chuckled, using the name he had given her at birth. “Little washerwoman Pinkie.” Her pale eyes bore into his, her eyebrows standing to attention.
The smile fell from Father’s face as he sat down in the doorway and he groaned slightly, the taut muscles in his back stretching with the movement. He wearily lifted his heavy feet; his boots caked with red clay from the road works. Pinkie watched him as he worked, hypnotised by the rhythmic unlacing of his boots. The wind cooled her burning cheeks and she blinked furiously, turning once more to face the washtub. Father glanced at the sky, watching the dirty smudges of yellow stars that had begun to appear in the distance. Behind him, Pinkie’s choked voice was breaking the silence.
“Mother’s not sick,” she said earnestly. “She’s getting the tea.”
Father was suddenly cold and the hairs on his arms stood to attention. His gaze fell on the house. Its flaky white paint was peeling around the windowsills, the garden beds a mess of scraggy bushes and wild geraniums. Vines clawed their way up the outside walls, choking out other plants. An open-air veranda fenced in three sides of the house and it was from here that Mother would watch the partially obscured road for hours on end, waiting for a rare passing car to break the silence. At the sound of an engine in the distance, her eyes would become glassy and her face taut, a small smile creeping out at the edges of her lips. Hands gripping the veranda, knuckles white, she would peer out between the rows of May bushes that ran along the fenceline, hoping to catch a glimpse of the car’s shiny duco. But as the cars would pass by the house, leaving in their wake a cloud of brown dust, Mother’s eyes would lose their shine, her hands would become limp again, and her face would settle back into its lines.
”I’ll have to go inside soon,” Father said softly into the stillness. His brown face was creased like leather.
“When I’ve washed the pants I’ll come too,” Pinkie answered loudly. Her voice echoed, staccato, into the darkness. The muscles in her arms twitched involuntarily, like dogs nipping at the heels of strangers. Father showed no sign of having heard her. Standing quickly, he brushed the dirt off the back of his pants and turned toward the house.
Evening had fallen, and the sky stretched bleakly away toward the mountains. Father paused a moment before pushing into the house, running the corns on his hands over the rough and rusty door handle. The old kitchen door screeched loudly as he entered, and slammed shut behind him. The house was cold, dark. Breakfast things were still messily spread over the small kitchen table, and one of the children had emptied the saucepan cupboard of its contents.
“The fire’s out,” a stony voice said from the darkness.
Father turned to see his wife standing in the doorway, her thinning muslin dress loose on her skinny frame. She often moved like that, silent and swift, through the rooms of their small house. Her hollow cheeks gave her the appearance of having constantly pursed lips.
“Hullo Pearlie,” Father said, leaning forward to place a kiss on her cold cheek. She flicked her grey eyes up at him and his heart sank. Little Eric, naked but for a singlet, ran in and threw his arms around Father’s weak knees.
“G’day sport,” Father said, ruffling the boy’s hair.
“The fire’s out. Nancy said she was getting the wood.” Mother moved to the kitchen bench. Outside, Father could hear Nancy’s soft whistling as she washed the pants.
“You know Pinkie’s too small to chop the wood. She can’t get the fire going,” he replied. He glanced at the stove, and it was dead black.
“It’s always ‘Pinkie’,” Mother sneered, spittle forming at the corners of her mouth.
In the bedroom, newly born Clem woke up from his nap and began to cry. Mother let out an exasperated sigh and tears began pricking at her eyes. Glaring at Father, she picked up a teacup and threw it to the floor. Small pieces of china shattered into all corners of the kitchen. Eric began to wail loudly, and clung tighter to his father, who could only look on blankly. Father gripped Eric’s arm tightly, to stop him cutting open his tiny feet and dragging blood through the house. Mother then joined in Eric’s cry with one of her own. Together with Clem, the three of them were like the instruments of a human orchestra, dull and relentless in their song.
“You don’t know! Nancy said she was getting the wood!” Mother flew to the couch, hurtling herself on it and pulling at her unkempt hair with her hands. She rolled her head back and forth on the arm, moaning and weeping. Clem’s shrill cries cut across his brother’s snivelling and his mother’s moans. Tears welled in Father’s eyes. He roughly snapped Eric from his leg and pushed him to the floor, causing him to shriek louder. Father’s face was ugly in the dark light of the cold kitchen, jagged creases forming around his lips and eyes. He pushed open the back door and hurtled down the steps into the woodshed. “Go inside,” he called to Pinkie. He fetched an axe from the workbench. “Inside!” he snapped again. “The fire’s dead out. You had to get wood for the stove!”
“Oh, Father, I know!” Pinkie wailed.
Father began splitting damp wood with hard quick blows, sending pieces flying everywhere. He looked at his daughter, standing there in her dirty clothes. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes moist. His heart lurched and he desperately wanted to hug her. “Inside at once! Nancy!” He growled the last word. It sounded so foreign, coming from his lips, ‘Nancy’. His big arms stretched toward the sky, axe in hand, before he ripped them back to earth, scattering bits of wood in his wake. Pinkie’s lips formed words but her throat wouldn’t speak. The chop of her father’s axe was the beat to her mother’s wailing inside. Pinkie stood still on the back step whilst a bitter wind whipped the evening into frenzy. Father looked over his shoulder at her. He was panting now. Separated by blocks of firewood, Pinkie’s eyes met Father’s. After a moment’s hesitation she turned toward the house, her gaze falling to the ground, the blows of the axe echoing in her ears.
There was a wind, too, one of those winds that come with evening, a wind with a breath of warmth from the day just gone and a chilly edge warning of worse to come.
References
Masters, Olga (1996) Collected Stories, University of Queensland Press, Queensland.
the kitchen
This piece was written in 2005. It's loosely based on a real story. I used photos and memory to try and draw things together.
The Kitchen
On the day I was born, it rained. It rained for four days straight. They brought me home in the rusty old Volvo, carrying me in a little plastic bassinet with a sheet over it, up the front steps and into my grandmother’s warm kitchen. It rained when each of her grandchildren were born. No-one realised this pattern until Gemma came along – twelve years after Chiara, ten years after Simon, six years after me, four years after Luke, two years after Marc.
*
Years later Simon remembers that it was the warmth that drew him there, the fire that was always burning in the old stove; the familiarity of the chipped blue pot his Nonna used for making tea; the old vinyl kitchen chairs that would stick to the back of his thighs on a hot day and make sucking noises whenever he stood up; the shelf full of photos, the smiling faces of past friends and family staring back at him, faded and cracked portraits from a different time, a different world. He remembers the linen curtains that hung over the sink, the yellowing fabric dotted with pale blue flowers, wearing at the corners; the hot water tap that was always dripping, no matter how many new washers Nonno put in; the chequered linoleum floor that he and Chiara used to spend endless hours playing games on.
Giro giro tondo, casca il mondo, casca la terra, tutti per terra!
It was that kitchen that all the grandchildren were first brought to after leaving the hospital, that kitchen that was each child’s first taste and smell and experience of the family environment. Almost like their futures were being mapped out for them, three sets of parents saying, “Look, here it is, this is where you’ll do all your living and learning”. The fire in the stove would be lovingly stoked and prepared in advance for the new arrival. A pot of coffee was prepared, a panettone bought from the deli and cut into generous, thick slices. A celebration. A new member of the family. This same ritual was carried out for the arrival of each of the six grandchildren.
The family would gather for dinner, and Adalia would make pasta, hand-rolling it out in big long sheets that she’d then dry in the back room; pasta that the children would try to eat raw, sneaking little tastes of the crunchy dough from underneath the old tablecloth that covered it as it dried. The whole house would smell of wheat and egg and flour, of pasta, of cooking.
Simon remembers standing at the edge of the kitchen table with Chiara, looking up at Nonna, her big fleshy arms kneading away at the dough. Years of practice meant she’d become adept at pushing flyaway strands of hair from her sweaty brow with just her shoulder. The two children would stand there together and Nonna would give them a little taste of the raw pasta, and they’d eat it, and their faces would simultaneously contort, giant smiles bursting from their cheeks, “Yuuuuuuuk!”.
She’d make desserts and treats for the children, recipes her own mother passed on to her.
Uovo sbattuto: take two eggs and separate the whites; add one cup of sugar to the yolks, together with a capful of Marsala. Beat with a fork until smooth and creamy. Serve immediately.
The children would devour their afternoon tea clean off the plate, dripping it all over themselves, their hands and cheeks sticky, small pink tongues darting out to lick their fingertips clean.
Nonno would take Simon and Chiara to see the canaries, boxed away in their compartments in the aviary. He would gently guide his granddaughter’s small hands to the feeding tube where she’d always be the first one to refill it, blowing gently to remove bits of shredded paper and shell-grit. The little yellow birds would dance around their cages, chirping loudly, beating their small wings. Nonno would show them both how to tag each bird with a little plastic ring that they would clip onto its leg while it flailed wildly, and the two children would giggle uncontrollably when the bird pooed on Nonno’s hand.
Simon and Chiara would spend long winter afternoons sitting in front of the small white stove in the warm kitchen, ensuring it always had enough fuel to keep it going. They would run back and forth to the woodpile in the laundry, carrying small bits of kindling that Nonno spent the warmer days chopping. They would sit there, staring at the glowing embers, side by side, just the two of them.
The photo was taken in 1986. He’s a knight, she’s a princess. His face is round and full, framed by a shock of black hair, his fringe hanging loosely in his chocolate brown eyes; a bright blue skivvy clings to his skinny body, the sleeves pulled up as far as they’ll go, ready for action, his tummy exposed where the shirt rides up over his jeans; a bright red cape with gold fringes hangs proudly from his shoulders, swinging softly in the afternoon breeze, his name stitched onto the back in cursive lettering, the S merging into the I into the M, one letter after the other; his face set and rigid, wariness of the camera showing in the crinkle of his nose, the way his lips are pursed, hands held stiffly by his side. His eyes don’t look at the camera, they look at her.
Anna, Marta and Frank were all raised in that kitchen, and later it was there that they brought their future spouses to meet the parents; later still that they brought their newborn children. They all passed through that same narrow doorway, the one with the picture of Jesus hanging above it, tied to an old nail with the same tartan string that Nonna used to tie everything with – the tomatoes to their stakes, Christmas presents, blinds flapping in the wind. She kept the string in a huge drawer in the kitchen table that was always full of treasures, knick-knacks, things to entertain small minds on a rainy day, waiting for a new baby to arrive. Daniele and Luke sat there, waiting for Marc to come, whiling away the time with paper clips and masking tape, as Simon poked about behind them, alone, trying to stoke the fire.
The photo was taken in 1986. He’s a knight, she’s a princess. She’s wearing a bright yellow raincoat, plastic, shiny, a makeshift art-smock, a blue bunny embroidered on the breast, a nametag on the other – Chiara, arms splayed out in front, fingertips touching, creating, a pirouette; cascading dusty blonde hair, full rosy cheeks swelling with each peal of laughter, gapped teeth, count them, one, two, three, a game, a tiny pink tongue darting between the spaces, giggling, eyebrows dancing like caterpillars across her brow, up and down, round and round, tiny ears twitching. A body that won’t sit still.
Nonna and Nonno had a rickety old swing set in their backyard that all the children played on. Chiara and Simon would take turns on the monkey-bars and then push each other on the swing-seat. Above the swing hung a giant fig-tree, a gnarled and cracked old beast that would creak in the wind, with branches that splayed out at funny angles, perfect for climbing. The two children would scramble up the lower limbs and pick the small pear-shaped fruits before the birds got to them, and they’d devour a bucketful in an afternoon. Sometimes Jade from across the street would play with them, too. And then, one day, Nonna said Chiara couldn’t play because she was sick.
She’s wearing a pale blue gown, her skin sallow, hair matted and plastered to her cool brow. Nurses and doctors sweep into the room in a whirlwind of charts, pills, drips, jargon. Stat. Twelve drops before meals. Three tabs twice daily four times a week for six weeks. Do the hokey-pokey and shake it all about. Her fingers are cold and she looks so small in this big bed, swamped by blankets and whirring machines and tubes and buttons. Days blur, an avalanche of medication, sleepless night, tears, boxes of tissues, more tears, hushed conversation, dawning realisation. A body that’s just still.
The sun was shining on the day they buried Chiara. Simon stayed home with Jan, one of Nonna’s neighbours. He sat in the kitchen and drew pictures of King Arthur and Optimus Prime. He kept getting up to check that the fire was still burning, and when he saw that it was getting low he’d run to the laundry to get some more wood so that the fire was always alive.
*
I know the kitchen now. Stark and white with sticky floors and a leaking chimney that drops soot on the bench top; cupboards that aren’t functional, trapped behind glass doors that have trouble opening; a skylight too dirty and clouded with dead moths to be of any use. A shiny new European stainless steel oven replaces the old beaten up stove under the alcove, and the drawer in the kitchen table that once held all those childhood treasures is now empty and impractical. Harsh fluorescent light isn’t kind to the poky old room, a musty smell lingering in every drawer. Most of all, it’s cold.
The Kitchen
On the day I was born, it rained. It rained for four days straight. They brought me home in the rusty old Volvo, carrying me in a little plastic bassinet with a sheet over it, up the front steps and into my grandmother’s warm kitchen. It rained when each of her grandchildren were born. No-one realised this pattern until Gemma came along – twelve years after Chiara, ten years after Simon, six years after me, four years after Luke, two years after Marc.
Years later Simon remembers that it was the warmth that drew him there, the fire that was always burning in the old stove; the familiarity of the chipped blue pot his Nonna used for making tea; the old vinyl kitchen chairs that would stick to the back of his thighs on a hot day and make sucking noises whenever he stood up; the shelf full of photos, the smiling faces of past friends and family staring back at him, faded and cracked portraits from a different time, a different world. He remembers the linen curtains that hung over the sink, the yellowing fabric dotted with pale blue flowers, wearing at the corners; the hot water tap that was always dripping, no matter how many new washers Nonno put in; the chequered linoleum floor that he and Chiara used to spend endless hours playing games on.
Giro giro tondo, casca il mondo, casca la terra, tutti per terra!
It was that kitchen that all the grandchildren were first brought to after leaving the hospital, that kitchen that was each child’s first taste and smell and experience of the family environment. Almost like their futures were being mapped out for them, three sets of parents saying, “Look, here it is, this is where you’ll do all your living and learning”. The fire in the stove would be lovingly stoked and prepared in advance for the new arrival. A pot of coffee was prepared, a panettone bought from the deli and cut into generous, thick slices. A celebration. A new member of the family. This same ritual was carried out for the arrival of each of the six grandchildren.
The family would gather for dinner, and Adalia would make pasta, hand-rolling it out in big long sheets that she’d then dry in the back room; pasta that the children would try to eat raw, sneaking little tastes of the crunchy dough from underneath the old tablecloth that covered it as it dried. The whole house would smell of wheat and egg and flour, of pasta, of cooking.
Simon remembers standing at the edge of the kitchen table with Chiara, looking up at Nonna, her big fleshy arms kneading away at the dough. Years of practice meant she’d become adept at pushing flyaway strands of hair from her sweaty brow with just her shoulder. The two children would stand there together and Nonna would give them a little taste of the raw pasta, and they’d eat it, and their faces would simultaneously contort, giant smiles bursting from their cheeks, “Yuuuuuuuk!”.
She’d make desserts and treats for the children, recipes her own mother passed on to her.
Uovo sbattuto: take two eggs and separate the whites; add one cup of sugar to the yolks, together with a capful of Marsala. Beat with a fork until smooth and creamy. Serve immediately.
The children would devour their afternoon tea clean off the plate, dripping it all over themselves, their hands and cheeks sticky, small pink tongues darting out to lick their fingertips clean.
Nonno would take Simon and Chiara to see the canaries, boxed away in their compartments in the aviary. He would gently guide his granddaughter’s small hands to the feeding tube where she’d always be the first one to refill it, blowing gently to remove bits of shredded paper and shell-grit. The little yellow birds would dance around their cages, chirping loudly, beating their small wings. Nonno would show them both how to tag each bird with a little plastic ring that they would clip onto its leg while it flailed wildly, and the two children would giggle uncontrollably when the bird pooed on Nonno’s hand.
Simon and Chiara would spend long winter afternoons sitting in front of the small white stove in the warm kitchen, ensuring it always had enough fuel to keep it going. They would run back and forth to the woodpile in the laundry, carrying small bits of kindling that Nonno spent the warmer days chopping. They would sit there, staring at the glowing embers, side by side, just the two of them.
The photo was taken in 1986. He’s a knight, she’s a princess. His face is round and full, framed by a shock of black hair, his fringe hanging loosely in his chocolate brown eyes; a bright blue skivvy clings to his skinny body, the sleeves pulled up as far as they’ll go, ready for action, his tummy exposed where the shirt rides up over his jeans; a bright red cape with gold fringes hangs proudly from his shoulders, swinging softly in the afternoon breeze, his name stitched onto the back in cursive lettering, the S merging into the I into the M, one letter after the other; his face set and rigid, wariness of the camera showing in the crinkle of his nose, the way his lips are pursed, hands held stiffly by his side. His eyes don’t look at the camera, they look at her.
Anna, Marta and Frank were all raised in that kitchen, and later it was there that they brought their future spouses to meet the parents; later still that they brought their newborn children. They all passed through that same narrow doorway, the one with the picture of Jesus hanging above it, tied to an old nail with the same tartan string that Nonna used to tie everything with – the tomatoes to their stakes, Christmas presents, blinds flapping in the wind. She kept the string in a huge drawer in the kitchen table that was always full of treasures, knick-knacks, things to entertain small minds on a rainy day, waiting for a new baby to arrive. Daniele and Luke sat there, waiting for Marc to come, whiling away the time with paper clips and masking tape, as Simon poked about behind them, alone, trying to stoke the fire.
The photo was taken in 1986. He’s a knight, she’s a princess. She’s wearing a bright yellow raincoat, plastic, shiny, a makeshift art-smock, a blue bunny embroidered on the breast, a nametag on the other – Chiara, arms splayed out in front, fingertips touching, creating, a pirouette; cascading dusty blonde hair, full rosy cheeks swelling with each peal of laughter, gapped teeth, count them, one, two, three, a game, a tiny pink tongue darting between the spaces, giggling, eyebrows dancing like caterpillars across her brow, up and down, round and round, tiny ears twitching. A body that won’t sit still.
Nonna and Nonno had a rickety old swing set in their backyard that all the children played on. Chiara and Simon would take turns on the monkey-bars and then push each other on the swing-seat. Above the swing hung a giant fig-tree, a gnarled and cracked old beast that would creak in the wind, with branches that splayed out at funny angles, perfect for climbing. The two children would scramble up the lower limbs and pick the small pear-shaped fruits before the birds got to them, and they’d devour a bucketful in an afternoon. Sometimes Jade from across the street would play with them, too. And then, one day, Nonna said Chiara couldn’t play because she was sick.
She’s wearing a pale blue gown, her skin sallow, hair matted and plastered to her cool brow. Nurses and doctors sweep into the room in a whirlwind of charts, pills, drips, jargon. Stat. Twelve drops before meals. Three tabs twice daily four times a week for six weeks. Do the hokey-pokey and shake it all about. Her fingers are cold and she looks so small in this big bed, swamped by blankets and whirring machines and tubes and buttons. Days blur, an avalanche of medication, sleepless night, tears, boxes of tissues, more tears, hushed conversation, dawning realisation. A body that’s just still.
The sun was shining on the day they buried Chiara. Simon stayed home with Jan, one of Nonna’s neighbours. He sat in the kitchen and drew pictures of King Arthur and Optimus Prime. He kept getting up to check that the fire was still burning, and when he saw that it was getting low he’d run to the laundry to get some more wood so that the fire was always alive.
I know the kitchen now. Stark and white with sticky floors and a leaking chimney that drops soot on the bench top; cupboards that aren’t functional, trapped behind glass doors that have trouble opening; a skylight too dirty and clouded with dead moths to be of any use. A shiny new European stainless steel oven replaces the old beaten up stove under the alcove, and the drawer in the kitchen table that once held all those childhood treasures is now empty and impractical. Harsh fluorescent light isn’t kind to the poky old room, a musty smell lingering in every drawer. Most of all, it’s cold.
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