Author: Nicole Lobry de Bruyn

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Shark Weather

The day started out overcast. The sky and sea merge. Dead calm. Mill pond. All the phrases come to mind as I view the coast on the drive to school. The ocean is glassy, the ripples so far apart that the sea takes on the look of a shiny floor; able to be walked upon. A Jesus surface. And Rottnest on the horizon is sharply in focus. Normally it is a smudge out there. Land, yes, but not decipherable. Today even the dunes can be seen, shining iridescently white and the lighthouse, and the wind turbine too. Three ships sit on the ocean, like they have been placed atop the silvery floor. A helicopter patrols the misty water. The sun starts to break the ocean’s surface, turning it again liquid. No longer mauve organza settling on a dressmaker’s table.

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from short story “Vivian Relf” by Jonathan Lethem

In this passage Jonathan Lethem writes of two young people standing outside at a party trying to work out where they know each other from, feeling distinctly familiar to each other, but turning out not to be acquainted.

” In the grade of woods over the girl’s shoulder Doran sighted two pale copper orbs, flat as coins. Fox? Bunny? Racoon? He motioned for the girl to turn and see, when at that moment Top approached them from around the corner of the house. Doran’s hand fell, words died on his lips. Tiny hands or feet scrabbled urgently in the underbrush, as though they were repairing a watch. The noise vanished.”

” Later that night he saw her again, across two rooms, through a doorway. The party had grown. She was talking to someone new, a man, not her friends. He felt he still recognised her, but the sensation hung uselessly in a middle distance, suspended, as in amber, in doubt so thick it was a form of certainty. She irked him, that was all he knew.”

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Telling the Time

For a long time Jasper has had trouble with reading the analog clock. Everyone reads the time off the microwave. 6.50. Little fluorescent squared numbers. Marching on without tick. Without tock. 7.30. Help! 8.15. Shoes on. Didn’t I tell you already. Have you done your teeth? Shoes! It doesn’t help that for most of his life our antique kitchen wall clock has been stuck on ten to eleven – a beautifully in between time.

Recently Graham got the old clock going again. It has a loud tick tock. An incessant heartbeat – a clicking tongue, a real reminder of lateness. It is invasive, but a chance to learn to read the time. An essential skill that seems to have slipped through unlearnt. 20 cents for each correct telling of the time.

We haven’t had dinner. Graham isn’t home. What’s the time Jasper? Ten to eight. No. What time does dad get home? I dunno. How could it be ten to eight. Look at it again. Is the hour hand before the eight or the seven?

Before school the same routine. What’s the time? 8.30? No. How can it be 8.30? What time do we leave home in the morning to get to school? I dunno.

For I am the keeping of time in our house.

Always the one to harp – are you ready? We should go! We should go now. In every house there is a clock watcher. I get it from my mother who kept time for my father. Call Dad. Tell him we are leaving in five minutes. Still she is a keeper of time. She has an egg timer that she sets constantly and while you visit it goes off. But there is no cake to get out of any oven. No sprinkler to move to another patch of grass. Perhaps it is telling her you have been in attendance ten minutes. Or perhaps it is telling her it is fifteen minutes before her lunch. To take the role of clock watcher one vows; Never late. Always early. Always waiting for other people. This is what my mother passed on to me.

 

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from “Freedom” by Jonathan Franzen

In this scene an unmotherly mother attempts to mother a teenage daughter who has been raped;

“It was shocking to see her mother in the gym and obviously shocking to her mother to find herself there. She was wearing her everyday pumps and resembled Goldilocks in daunting woods as she peered around uncertainly at the naked metal equipment and the fungal floors and the clustered balls in mesh bags. Patty went to her and submitted to embrace. Her mother being much smaller of frame, Patty felt somewhat like a grandfather clock that Joyce was endeavouring to lift and move.”

 

“Well then how could this happen!”

“Let’s just go home.”

“No. You have to tell me. I’m your mother.”

Hearing herself say this, Joyce looked embarrassed. She seemed to realise how peculiar it was to have to remind Patty who her mother was. And Patty, for one, was finally glad to have this doubt out in the open. If Joyce was her mother, then how had it happened that she hadn’t come to the first round of the state tournament when Patty had broken the all time Horace Greeley girls’ tournament scoring record with 32 points. Somehow everybody else’s mother had found time to come to that game.”

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Old Money

Going through Goong Goong’s things I find a dark green vinyl policy wallet from a company that I think doesn’t exist anymore. The M.L.C – the Mutual Life and Citizens’ Assurance company Limited, and in its plastic sleeve some old bank notes. They are fervent reminders of the past when paper money was really paper not plastic. And even though their value is poor – for it is only a five dollar and a ten dollar note – I remember them as if a child when ten dollars seemed so much money. Think what you could buy with ten dollars. The feel of the note is substantial, weighty, crisp. Real. It has a smell to it. If I hold it close to my nose I can smell him – or how he used to smell when he was the provider, the carer of the family, the man of the house. The money has the smell of a man’s wallet. Of leather and trousers. Of corduroys and car travel. Of Adults. Then with another whiff, comes a whimsical careless notion that it has been given to you by a generous old Aunt, the one with the stiff swollen knees, smelling of rose water, from a purse with a clasp, who has told you to spend it on something you want.

It is not like money today that is spat from a machine, stuffed in the wallet before it is seen, handed over as quickly as it is received. Or else a wallet with no cash but bulging with plastic. Paying by card. Tapping in PIN numbers. OK. Fifty dollar notes made of plastic polymer, smaller and less pretty, buying next to nothing, with no smell and no feel.

Australian money – once so playful. So colourful. Like we really knew that money should be fun. Purple, blue, green and orange. Designed as if by clever children. Not sombre. Seventies notes – Not suits and ties, more flowing frocks and bell bottoms.

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Sleeping in the Sitting Room

I am six when I enter the sitting room late at night to find my parents. I have a pain in my ear. Or perhaps it is my tooth. I cannot articulate where the pain is. Or even what it is. It is a new sensation. Not one I want again. It is making me cry. I am. Crying. I am. All pain. All ear. All tooth. The room is spinning. My parents are cross after a time when their consoling is making no difference to my whimper. Bex. A bed is made up in the sitting room so I can be close to them. Perhaps this will make the pain go away. Away. Bex is crushed and mixed in strawberry jam. A teaspoon big in front of my face. Open. Open. Open wide. Eat it. Drink it. Swallow it. Lying on my side I feel a throbbing. Being close to them is not helping. Darkness helps. Close my eyes. Head deep in the made up bed. Close to the floor. Close enough to place a palm on the floor. Feel their footsteps through the wood. Come and go. A palm on my forehead. A flannel. Whispers.

 

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Poor Poodles

A poodle faces its owner, squinting. She sprays its hairdo which stands a foot-tall upon its head – stiff like whipped meringue. How must the hound feel about the assault of fumes when it owns such a clever and distinguishing nose? For a creature whose world is made up of all it smells it must be an anathema. No wonder others are barking at it, with its pompom bracelets and its heavily cushioned hips. Some say the poodle clip has its origins in shedding water from the coat, as well as keeping the joints and chest warm while out retrieving water fowl, but one wonders how much river water these poodles see. Likely the only water is luke warm in a tub from a soft shower rose in a tiled bathroom.

Then the highly coiffured poodles with their continental clips take to the ring to prance around with proud owners. A man in a grey suit strides out, as exuberant and purposeful as the poodle he leads. He is intent on his poodle’s movements, taking his eyes off where he is going, watching his dog, and so catches his foot on a protruding wheel of a table. He tumbles head over heel, dragging his dog down with him. Like a sponge ball the poodle rolls and bounces, a powder-puff of white. On his feet as quickly as he was down, the man continues on around the ring and at the end of the display scoops the large dog into his arms and carries it, like a cradled child, to a table to be examined. He runs his hands over it, like a man reading braille.

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Rats in the Roof

Actually they are in the cramped ceiling space of our lean-to back kitchen and at night we hear them squabbling and scampering.  The pitter patter of their tiny feet makes Jasper and I look up from our books and wince painfully at one another. Neither of us can bear the sound of their scampering little feet. Like the rats in Beatrix Potter’s Roly Poly pudding they have set up home. Sometimes I even think of them in waist coats. Put up more poison, I suggest to Graham. God knows what became of the last square of killer bait that was thrown between the tin and the wooden ceiling. It did not dent their numbers. The unforgettable taint of decomposing rodent did not follow. How welcome the whiff might have been. Just more rustling. Still as dusk comes on their scurrying begins. For surely they have a hostage up there. Like the kitten that Anna Marie and Samuel Whiskers succeeded in capturing, I imagine them with some small morsel, rolling it this way and that across the ceiling boards. My shoulders hunch and I feel the hairs on my neck rise as yet another race goes on above my head.

It is a childhood fear, stemming from the chook house. Opening the lid to the grain bin and reaching in to scoop a tin-full of grain to feed the chooks, I feel the feet on me. Then a flash as something, unseen, but witnessed, zooms up my arm and is gone. I cannot say I saw it even. But it was a rodent. From in the wheat bin it came. Raced up the escape route that was my eight year old skinny brown arm and away. I screamed, girlishly, shrillishly. I jumped in the air.

The dog is no deterrent, not raising his nose even to sniff the air. A cat would do better. At night waiting. Quick to pounce. The dog is too well fed, too full of slumber. The rats too watchful. From where do they come? We are near the port, of course, and then there are the figs and olives in yards. Perhaps as the summer rolls on (after all I can hear cicadas) and the ceiling space becomes an unbearable oven, they will move away. Take their tiny feet, their rolling pin, and go.

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Drug Deals

Drug deals go on outside our house on the park by the community pool’s fence. It is out in the open really. It is not clandestine. The guys wear baseball caps; one even has it backwards. They have the requisite baggy pants, the crutch of which is around the knees. Like babies whose nappies are sodden and heavy, they walk with an awkward swagger.  It is sunny and clear and the air has a fresh washed-down smell to it. Or no smell. No sheep ship.

Lately the local paper has complained of the drug’s trade escalation and some locals have died due to the high purity of the stuff on the streets. I am reticent to let Jasper take the lane way home after tennis, in case he comes across a drug deal. It used to be the homeless and the drunken who made us take the long way. Now it is the pushers with the puffy shoes and the oversized trousers. Yesterday hail came down and shred the Golden Robinia of its spring leaves, peppering the footpath with yellow.

It is time for school pick up so I drive to the school near the ocean. I take the dog so he can exercise his nose. Three foot high cliffs of sea weed border the shore. Winter storms have dumped it here, to stagnate and smell. To dogs it is heaven sent. And perhaps heaven-scented. The waves carve out caverns making shipwrecked hulls of the grey mounds. Bees are busy about the dunes, their legs bulging with the burden of Yellow Dandelions.

Four Chinese girls sit on the kerbside by the beach. One hands the others a Kleenex baby wipe each to rid their feet of the soft white beach sand that you or I would neither notice or care about.

We return home and the drug dealer’s oval is awash with after school sport. Criss crossing it are high school students and a pair stop midway to kiss. They stand facing one another and she puts her hands on his shoulders as if to steady herself and to secure him to the spot. The pony-tailed girl is a couple of inches taller than the boy. He breaks off the kiss. He spins her around by yanking on her rucksack and they collapse together on the grass. She leans over him to kiss him again. Look Mum sex on the oval, says Jasper.

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from “The Sisters Brothers” by Patrick DeWitt

This book by Patrick DeWitt just about fulfils my every need – a mix between Deadwood and Cormac McCarthy. On a sentence level it is music, surprising you every now and then with a great metaphor. On a whole book level it is full of suspense and dare I say it – plot. Within moments the reader is feeling warmth for the killer, Eli and disdain for his brother Charlie.

When Charlie and Eli enter a cabin inhabited by a witch-like woman DeWitt writes;

“Charlie’s face had grown hard.’This isn’t your cabin, is it?’

At this she stiffened, and did not look to be breathing. She pulled back her rags, and in the firelight and lamplight I saw she had almost no hair on her head, only white tufts here and there, and her skull was dented, appearing soft in places, pushed in like an old piece of fruit. ‘Every heart has a tone,’ she said to Charlie,’just as every bell has one. Your heart’s tone is most oppressive to hear, young man. It is hurtful to my ears, and your eyes hurt my eyes to look at them.'”