“…make an honest platform of story in your mind, like a raft, using the sound timber of everything you’ve loved and read. As with any raft, it may sometimes feel unsteady: it may falter under the weight it must carry, and, over time, it will need repair. It may not withstand the sea for all eternity but nor does it need to – it needs to last a lifespan, nothing more. For the time that it does hold together, you can stand on it like Robinson Crusoe and look back at the site of your own shipwreck, and you can say to yourself, as he did, grateful for being able to say it, ‘I am here, not there.'”
Jasper and the Yellow Burley
Good Friday means there are no cars on the road. The pool is closed today like it is on Christmas day. There is no music blasting from aqua aerobics. No drone of leaf blowers across the cement. No whistles from the coach punishing the squads. Our neighbourhood is at its quietest. Someone will probably bake Nigella’s Norwegian Buns and invite the others around. Yeasty, buttery, sugary cinnamon buns. No ordinary Baker’s Delight Hot Cross Buns around here.
People go away for Easter, if they can, and this year the holiday is longer than most with ANZAC day thrown in. Families leave the city with car roof racks piled with surfboards, bikes clinging to bumpers, eskies full. This is when the weather changes in the West. Marshmallow clouds hold promise. It will rain, we hope.
Jasper has a new football. It is a yellow Burley. A Rover. For nine to eleven year olds. Snug in his mitts. Made in India, Jasper tells me. He is surprised. Isn’t India a poor country? You’d think they would be wealthy from all the footballs. Pumped hard it stings the tops of his foot as he bombs it as far as he can.
We can’t go anywhere. On watch for frailty. My dad has had a suprapubic catheter put in. This means his bladder will drain into a bag, by-passing his urethra which is becoming narrowed and invaded by the cancer in his penis. Like a rocky gorge its insides have become craggy, spiky; a place of pain.
We wait for him to come back to the nursing home in an ambulance. We can hear him coming down the corridor. His familiar chant to any staff required to move him; No more No more.
But we do more. Always. Pushing and prodding.
He is slid over from the gurney to the bed. Not until there are no hands on him and he is in the bed does he settle.
The catheter means the staff will need to fuss less around the painful penis.There will be less changing of pads and beds, less sensation to urinate and no urine stinging its way through the diseased urethra. Now the urine is bloody, but this is supposed to be temporary.
But the RN on duty looks dubious as to the difference it might make to his pain. Still very painful, she says.
Can we leave him alone now, I wonder. Can we finally stop all the intervention? There is talk of radiation. The urologist thinks it might ease the pain. But it will not cure the cancer. It has gone beyond that. No one thinks they can do anything more but alleviate pain. But pain still exists. He is still irritable, asking to be left alone. But then again can’t be left alone because he can do nothing for himself. His hands are like claws, grabbing at rails. Hanging on. The skin of his face is suctioned to his skull. His skin is yellowing, but stubble continues to grow. Like stubborn weeds his eyebrows sprout in mad directions off his brow.
Jasper wants to go and kick the Burley. The nursing home smells. Daisy Jones has lost her room again. We take her to room number seventeen, remind her again, that this is her room. How much do I need to pay for it? she asks. She shuffles in a wheelchair using her feet to propell herself, one arm across her chest, useless from a stroke. Her eyes begin to fill with tears as we talk to her. I don’t know where I am , she says. Walking through the dining room, on our way out, the oldies all look at the boy with the yellow ball spinning on his hand. He bounces it and catches it, because he can.
Grace on the Park
Twenty thousand people on a park, jostling and moving together, swaying and gyrating to music is proof of the sociability of the human species. I am less sociable than most and sometimes a crowd like this is too much. But when Michael Franti is in the crowd you want to be part of it. Hands reach out to touch him. To steal a morsel of his sweat. I wanna see you jumping. And they jump. I wanna see your hands in the air and they raise and pump them. Anything you say and we will do it. His ropey hair hurls around his head, while his strides large and gazelle-like, see him leap across the stage. Barefoot. Real Freo Type. His shirt claims he loves Perth but you know he is really only talking Fremantle.
Under foot the grass is trampled flat. In front of the stage the dedicated fans push forward. To feel the bass. To feel the rhythm through their skin, not just their ears. You want your innards to vibrate. The earth shakes with the drum beat. Back on the rise the grass is spotted red with the cardboard seats like pizza boxes. Tents hug the perimeter no-climb fencing with their generic signs: Bar, food, toilets, ATM, tickets, First aid, recycling, water. Lines of people snake their way to buy a ticket to buy a drink. Little sachets of wine to be sucked on baby-like through a straw. But why leave the music? It is the music you are here for.
On a constructed platform for the viewing pleasure of the disabled, me and my eight year old are parked. It is a logistical nightmare to get off the platform. It requires asking half a dozen other wheelchair bound people and their carers to move them and then risk losing your space. Queen to Bishop. So we don’t go. Don’t worry I have come armed with a box of Shapes, a packet of peanuts, a water bottle. We are in for the long haul. This is festival survival.
Over the mosh pit crowd we have a clear view to the stage. When Bob Dylan comes on he is small. He has a cream wide brimmed hat. He faces side on playing the keyboard. Jasper says he can’t see his face. Neither can I. Nor the remaining thousands behind. And we are so close compared to most. There is no projection of him on the screens. We look back to the sea of people. Ones outside the perimeter too, up on the hill in front of the school tennis courts, take in the sound if not the sight for free. But Bob is moving. There is energy in his swagger. The music is still his, delivered by him, possessed of his spirit, even if his voice can no longer deliver. Jasper has been drip fed Bob Dylan but the music is unfamiliar to him, the voice unrecognizable, as the man his father claims is the greatest, croaks through his songs. Jasper’s lids grow heavy. Next thing he is asleep. Mouth agape. As a hard rain is going fall. I cover him a shawl and he could be anyway.
A woman older than me, the carer for her disabled and non speaking husband, starts booing Bob as he sings. Boo Boo she goes right beside my ear. He can’t hear you I say, but I can. Please don’t boo. It’s a travesty that he’s singing like that, she says. Like she believes he has the power to change the old, aching state of his voice. Maybe this is the best he can do. She takes her husband and leaves. Disappointed. How will they feel about Bob when they get home. Trash their collection? Will he no longer be a hero of the mute man?
It is mellow. The crowd wants more. Keeps praying he will look their way. Really look at them. Maybe say something too. How wild would they go if he said Hello Fremantle? In the end he glimpses up only a few times. But when he does he seems happy to have seen us.
Grace Jones couldn’t be more opposite. You imagine her wishing to be devoured by the crowd of eyes. She wants you to see her all. Even the bits you’d rather not. She has a body of which to be proud and proud she is. In fish nets and a velvet corset she totters on heels. She nearly falls, swears and then makes fun of herself and her crew that she tortures. In her band is one of her sons and I wonder if he finds her antics excruciating. She is the original show girl able to effortlessly hula hoop through an entire song, proving her fitness. She knows how to make the audience adore her and she willingly gives them want they want. It is all artifice beautifully agreed to by both parties. Her severely short Afro and her sweat, every crevice and curve filmed and blown large on the screens beside the stage show her, transvestite-like and viper, trawling the stage like a street walker.The crowd both her pimp and her john. Pull up to the bumpa baby. Jasper is awake again and agog at her presence. He’s not sure if he likes her but he can’t take his eyes off her. Mesmorised.
We, the crowd, pour out like cattle. Slow moving through the narrow exit gates, churning sand beneath our feet. The Blind Boys are still playing and the crowd in the Big Top still hooping and hollering their love. Eight hours, nearly the equivalent of a soon to do plane journey to Hawaii, has passed. Not so long to sit and ponder perhaps. But stuffy plane air, not outdoors under moonlight with whiffs of spliffs, and clouds less entertaining than Grace on the Park.
This Knife Ain’t Sharp Enough
My Dad is back in the hospital. His remaining penis is like a bloated poorly-cooked pork sausage.
I am reminded of a neighbour beyond the pickets whose favourite children’s party game was called pork sausage. The children would be in a line. No smiling, laughing, giggling allowed. He would go along the line and point and grope you on the body or the face and in a heavy Welsh accent say, What’s that there? And your answer had to be pork sausage but you weren’t allowed to laugh. Laugh and you were out. I was good at this game. It seemed the saying of pork sausage was hilarious to most small children. And when coupled with a big bellied man pointing and fondling your ear lobe, and asking you what it was, and having to say it was something it wasn’t, something as ridiculous as pork sausage, it was very nearly impossible. But I could do it every time. He could pinch my nose, my ears, grapple with a roll of tummy, fiddle my fingers and I could say it straight-faced. Pork sausage, Mr Elliot. Till I was the last kid standing. Grim-faced. Thinking, not funny Mr Elliot.
Winning this game did not endear you to adults. They wanted to see kids giggling uncontrollably. They loved to tickle you till tears were welling in your eyes. A kid that didn’t find pork sausage funny was a kid with no sense of humour.
This is what we are here for; to exam the pork sausage and decide its fate. No giggles. Not funny. The nursing home GP thinks an area of tumour recurrence can be seen near the urethral opening and he has organised Dad to go back to the private hospital to be seen by the surgeon who did the partial penectomy in the first place.
The ambulance is transporting him. I meet them at the doctor’s rooms but there has been a mix up. He is to be admitted and the consultant will see him on the ward when he has finished his appointments.
In the ward they have him down for 2pm. We have nine. But they find him a room. No 13. I sit talking to him but he has his head turned away and is not answering me. I go to the other side of the bed and then he realises it is me.
Oh Nicole, what a surprise. I explain he is in the hospital to have his penis looked at. Because it is sore isn’t it Dad? That’s why we are doing this.
He starts out just a little old man, a little confused. After six hours he no longer knows what he is, where he is and he’s as mad as a cut snake.
A nurse comes in and wants to take a peek downstairs. He is saying no more no more but she manages a look and with her ultrasound measures his bladder volume. It has 138mls in it and he has wet his pad in his pants. Reluctantly I call it a nappy.
He has bitten his lip or his tongue in the transport and has some blood in his mouth. I ask him about it but he doesn’t seem aware of it. I get him a choc milk and he drinks it with a straw.
He starts talking about leaving and all the things he must do to leave. He will need a bus on the highway. But where is he going to? What is his home address?
He is trying to swing his legs out of the bed and attempting to sit up. He is easy to push back down. And when I do he has to start his effort all over again. It weakens and tires him.
I wait till he is nearly up then down I push him. I think he probably doesn’t know I have done this to him half a dozen times. Each time I stop him getting up he is surprised I have stopped him.
When he is nearly upright I stop him again and he says, Oh no oh no. Exasperated. He leans back down in the bed. You have to stay Dad to see the doctor. Over and over again I say it.
I am driving myself nuts.
Oh I love you darling, but I have to go. I have so much to do at home.
He asks me why. Why must we stay for the doctor? I have him booked next week and he gives me a wink. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.
I have a lot to do at home. The dogs and cats need to be fed.
No time for yakkity yak.
He says I am trying to hoodwink him. He says the nurse is part of the secret service. Everyone is keeping stuff from him. Like information. Like addresses and where he is.
They move his bed from room 13 down the corridor close to the nurses’ station and he falls asleep. He has his glasses on. When I tried to take them off he objected. You want to hoodwink me. You know I can’t go without my glasses. Why have you taken my socks and shoes off? I can’t go without my socks.
When he wakes up he is gripping the side bar of the bed like he thinks he is moving or falling.
Dad. Dad you’re okay. I try and peel his fingers from the side bar. But he is hanging on.
No, he says. He has woken up different. More stubborn. Ready to fight.
He has woken up in another world. He starts talking about straw. You need to move the straw. Give me the pliers. You have to dig it there. When I try and move his fingers he gets snarly with me.
Okay okay. But you don’t look comfortable.
Don’t take stuff without asking.
I can recognise the consultant’s voice outside. He’s on the ward. I feel relief to know Dad will be seen soon. He is slipping into further delusion and the longer it takes the harder it will be. I hear the consultant talking to nurses and then his voice fades as he heads into another room.
I poke my head out. Only nurses. A plate of cream cupcakes on their bench top.
I tell a nurse I am worried that I won’t see the urologist. Paranoia catching. Don’t let him skip us.
No no your Dad’s on the list.
The consultant’s voice wafts in and out of ear shot.
Dad is talking gibberish. Ellen on the TV.
The urologist enters the room smiling. He has beautiful teeth and a polished head.
Righto Alex. Do you remember me? I am your doctor who did your surgery. The nursing home wants me to have a look. They’re a bit worried about it. Despite Dad’s demented state the urologist talks to him like he is compose mentis.
I wonder why he bothers. Perhaps it is for my benefit. Maybe he thinks something might get through. When I tell him about the past month and how I am struggling with it all, he tells me how when his grandmother was dying he would gets calls from his mother all the time telling him today would be the day and how badly the grandmother was faring. In the end he said to his mother don’t call me till she’s dead. By the time she finally died he had done all his grieving, it was simply a relief. I think he is trying to empathise with me. But I am like his mother. I am the one who is doing it. I can’t say don’t tell me for there is no one else to do this.
Gloves snap on. He tries to move him in the bed; to get him to let go of the rails. But Dad is resistant and starts telling him to get off him.
You don’t ask, you just do.
Dad is shouting and the doctor pulls back. But Dad keeps on shouting. Swinging fists on skinny arms.
We might give him something to settle him before we look or else it’ll come to blows.
Two haloperidol, he tells the nurse.
I’ll be back. Gloves snap off.
Dad tells the nurse to go to. He is pointing at the door. Get out. Get out. You have no manners. Ask. You should ask.
Dad you need to take the tablets. She is proffering them close to his tongue and I am fearful she will get bitten. It’s feeling very veterinary. I am thinking of chemical restraint, muzzles. When faced with an aggressive dog we get the owner to help. Like the nurse is using me. Do you think you can get him to take them? I am like the client who stands back and drops the lead when the dog begins to growl. I don’t think I can do it, I say. But it is my dog. I am required to try.
When the owner gives up in the vet clinic the dog is put in a cage and the pole needle is used. As the dog is cornered the needle advances on it through the bars and a quick hard jab to the thigh muscles is attempted. Hopefully the needle doesn’t snap off. Hopefully the whole dose gets got. Victory is a dog that can’t curl its lip, can barely lift its head.
I suggest a needle for my Dad. The nurse thinks this might be just as hard. We persist with the little white tablets. Dad put your tongue out.
Don’t touch my nose, he shouts.
I try and give him the tablet so he can put it in his mouth himself. Perhaps it is control he wants. Trying to get him to take them from my fingers he is uncoordinated and we are not getting anywhere. Our fingers are like polar opposites on a magnet and he can’t take the tablet from me.
She gets a mini tub of ice-cream and I put the tablet in a teaspoon of vanilla. Here you go Dad. We get them down.
It has taken 30 minutes.
He is not very sedated when the doctor comes back. He is just as angry. He starts swearing. Fucking hell.
The nurse tells me not to worry. He’s not responsible. He’s not your Dad when he’s like this. Her being nice to me, tips me over and I am crying.
I am trying not to cry in front of Dad thinking this might upset him more but it doesn’t seems to effect him. He is oblivious of my noisy nose blows into paper towel. He has forgotten about me, who I am even. Why are you staring at me? he says.
The doctor tries to get him to pull down his pants but he can’t do it.
Okay Alex lift your bottom. Nothing. So in the end he yanks them. I am placating. Its Okay Dad.
You’re cruel to an old man.
Yes Dad I know.
He’s not that strong. You hold his wrists, can you? the doctor says to me. I am the client who digs in. Who says yes I can hold him, my writhing rabid dog, while you trim his nails.
Okay. I will. I grip them. They are thin. I push them down so the doctor can get a look. Dad is swearing and cursing me.
Get off me. Get off me. You brute.
The doctor is pawing down there.
He might as well be sawing it off for all the screaming Dad is doing. Is it really that sore I wonder? Is it just being restrained? Some dogs (think Cavalier King Charles Spaniel ) start to panic before a thing is done to them, screaming before anyone has touched them even. Is this Dad?
It’s thrombosed and woody but its not recurrence, the urologist says. I suspect the issue the staff is having is getting to it to clean him. But I don’t think there is benefit in doing more surgery. It might end up with a worse non-healing area. We could do some radiation for the pain. But he is still urinating. Actually if he stopped urinating it would be quick. It’s a good way to go. A potassium spike stops the heart.
We are talking about him across his woody penis while he rants and shouts. The urologist is pulling his nappy back up and we are telling him its over but he is still shouting abuse at us.
I want to hear the doctor Dad. Shh shh.
I think what we need to do is talk to the nursing home about what they see as the difficulties in managing the area. We can give him more pain relief but I think surgery is ill advised and he isn’t a good candidate. And he can’t have more clexane after the subdural bleed. We’re limited in what we can do.
I ask about a suprapubic catheter.
Hmm not necessary while he is urinating.
I just don’t want him to be in pain, I say. I don’t want him to have more intervention if it is likely to be bad for him. Tears are welling up again. I’ll be guided by you, I say. I am thinking what I want is for someone to take the responsibility out of my hands.
In my head I am thinking how crazy it is that we are talking about a urethral blockage causing a spike in blood potassium as a good way to go. Now we are imagining scenarios that are quick and painless. I think I know a quick and painless way – it’s called euthanasia and I do it to animals on a regular basis.
People don’t want to see their animals suffer and at the end of their lives they decide the time to bring them to the vet clinic. I give them a sedation that sinks their head to the table. They probably feel like they are floating. Then I clip a foreleg and put a tourniquet around the elbow. A vessel stands up. I slide the needle into the vein and a rush of blood comes into the hub, mixing with the green pentobarbitone, the red turns blue-black. I unclamp the rubber band and tell the owner I am going to inject now and they might sense their beloved pet slipping away. I inject slowly, as slowly as I can. By the time the ten mls is into the animal all breathing has stopped and the heart has slowed down. I change syringes for the next ten mls. By the end of this syringe the heart will have stopped. I say Nice and Peaceful like saying it will make it so and place a hand on the dog’s head or on the client’s hand if it is nearby. I check the heart. It is never beating but I take a minute to listen. Then I tell them their pet has passed away. Then they cry.
But my old Dad must hope for a quick and painless death some time in the future. We still don’t know how it’ll be. But this hospital business is not helping him.
We have been here six hours and the decision is made to do nothing. He can go home tomorrow. Endone might be a good thing. He’ll be more sedated.
The nurse brings me a cup of weak, luke-warm tea the colour of a muddy puddle. She had no teaspoon so she brings me a knife for which to stir. I am stirring my tea with a knife and Dad is asking me why I am staring at him.
I am thinking of how to kill you Dad, but this knife ain’t sharp enough.
Making Cake
I feel like baking. I feel like creaming butter and sugar till the mixture is pale and fluffy. It is one of the wonders of the world that sugar and butter can turn to this. Of course it is easy to do in this in the Sunbeam. The butter is cubed; usually it is still too cold from the fridge and the sugar is measured into the glass bowl. The motor is switched on and at first the mixers have trouble because the butter is too hard and the bowl vibrates and it all feels like it will never come together. Like an old car starting on a cold morning. Another image hard to conjure these days when cars start no matter what the weather. I use a spatula to push the stuff down to the centre so the mixers can start churning the butter and really soften it. It starts to change colour to a paler yellow as the sugar is rubbed into it. The granules of sugar, so clearly detectable before, are dissolving. It is turning to something other than butter and sugar.
I wonder who thought this could happen. Who was the first to discover that sugar and butter could do such a thing? And the end result of cake has no resemblance to its individual ingredients . When the people of France were starving during the French Revolution and there was no bread the French Queen was supposed to have said – Give them cake. She lost her head shortly after. My mother loved to tell us this whilst creaming.
When we were very little, before my mother had a mixer, and even after she had one, since she wasn’t very good at using machines, she made cakes by hand. This meant beating the sugar and butter together with a spoon. By forearm and wrist. It was aching stuff. Everyone got a turn at sitting with the bowl in their lap and having a good beat. Till their arm was so sore and it was handed over to someone else. You needed to sit down with a tea towel in your lap because you didn’t want to be the one to drop the bowl and you were too little to do it on the bench.
The necessary implement for this is a wooden spoon and the butter must be soft. The cake making must be known to be happening and the cake maker has had to get the butter out and put it on the sink well in advance of the need to use it. It cannot be a spur of the moment decision to make a cake where the butter and sugar must be creamed. And who would make a cake that didn’t need creaming. It is the only real cake after all. Easy quick cakes that just need melted butter and are whisked together are not cakes, proper cakes, my mother would say. And so later when she turned to the White Wings packet cakes this was what I thought. The thing did rise, it was still soft and cake-like, but it wasn’t a proper cake. After all the thing had come from a cardboard box and white sachets had been ripped open and poured into a bowl and a bit of milk or only water added. How did they turn eggs to powder. Mother didn’t know but she thought it was marvellous. Hardly any beating was required. Somehow all these dry powders made a cake that before had needed work, real work.
Back to the real cake; the arm is aching and the adversary – butter and sugar – seems unbeatable. Then it happens that the two have melded. Slowly they have transformed themselves from two things separate and different to one thing – magical and soft. Perhaps ten minutes has passed.
Then the eggs are added. One at a time. Some one might have to go down to the chook house for more. Cracked into the bowl and whisked into the beautifully smooth mixture. But oh the mixture looks ruined. It separates and yellows and curdles into bits. All that work creaming seems wasted by the adding of eggs. But a mother knows this is just a stage. It’ll be better when some flour is added. The sifted flour is sprinkled in. It binds and heals the curdled mixture. Another egg – more flour. Some milk too. Pale yellow and air light the mixture is scooped into a baking tin, already lined with parchment.
Then there are spoons to lick and a bowl too. One sibling gets the spoons and the other the bowl. Depends how fastidious a mother has been to get all the mixture into the bowl. Who will get the better deal?
Jasper shares the mixers with no one. Being a single child he has no siblings to squabble with over whose turn it is for the bowl. So sometimes the mixture is too much for him. I am left with the bowl. Pushing a finger around its rim. Like a child again I feel furtive, even though I am allowed. Something tells me it is greedy to keep licking. To keep poking a finger about till every morsel of mixture is gone. The bowl hardly needs washing.
But the mixture is so good. Almost better than the cake. Always.
from “Revolutionary Road” by Richard Yates
“He took a gulp of whiskey, seeing a quick blur of stars and moon through the wet dome of his glass. Then he started back for the house, but he didn’t make it; he had to turn around again and head out to the far border of the lawn and walk around out there in little circles; he was crying.
It was the smell of spring in the air that did it – earth and flowers – because it was almost exactly a year now since the time of the Laurel Players, and to remember the Laurel Players was to remember April Wheeler’s way of walking across the stage, and her smile, and the sound of her voice (‘Wouldn’t you like to be loved by me?’) , and in remembering all this there was nothing for Shep Campbell to do but walk around on the grass and cry, a big wretched baby with his fist in his mouth and the warm tears spilling down his knuckles.
He found it so easy and so pleasant to cry that he didn’t try to stop for a while, until he realised he was forcing his sobs a little, exaggerating their depth with unnecessary shudders. Then, ashamed of himself, he bent over and carefully set his glass on the grass, got out his handkerchief and blew his nose.
The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted: let yourself go and you started embellishing your own sobs, or you started telling about the Wheelers with a sad, sentimental smile and saying Frank was courageous and then what the hell did you have?”
That There, That There
That there, that there, she said, pointing at the man seated in a chair behind a table. He had his head down. He didn’t dare catch her eye. She started to shake. A frenzy now took hold of her. Her knees buckled, like a filly striking a pot hole. She was down. A crumpled mess of skirt and cloth in the dock. She was weeping too. Blubbering really. Someone had to help her but mostly they just stood by, unused to the spectacle.
But now it was almost over, she could let herself fall. She felt like she would go through the court room boards, as hard as they were, and beneath the building, so prim and proper, and through the dirt and deep into the earth where it was black and cloying and warm and cold. Part of her could not escape it. It would come upon her again and again. She could once more feel the soil on her face. After all, they’d filled her with grit, and not only her mouth.
She’d been dragged behind a shed. One had pushed her down and stood with his foot on her hand, grinding her skin beneath his army boot. Are you ready? he’d said to the other man. After raping her, one after the other, in the railway yard, they’d filled her up with sand and stones as far as they could put them. They’d been two boys in a gravel pit; she – a broken kewpie doll, their vessel.
She’d pleaded with them not to kill her for the sake of her baby. They’d been heedless. The one that had done her first complained to the other that he’d filled her too soon. He’d wanted to go again. So they started on her mouth. He broke her teeth.
Left alone in the yard of soot and black metal she rolled over and pulled down her dress. She found her shoe. She’d not been wearing a hat. They would despise her for this. It would become evidence of her poor standing. She wiped blood from her mouth. She coughed dirt. She saw them running off, again two boys. Army greens, same as her son. They too were heading for the Front. Perhaps in a foreign trench mud would fill their mouths.
She crawled to the outside, to the world she felt no longer part of. Into the night she called, Police Murder.
(this story was inspired by true events reported in the newspaper of the day. The story was reported under the headline “East Perth Horror” – Emily Lawson was raped by two returned soldiers in the July of 1917 and both were found guilty by a judge and were given life sentences. The judge said,” Were you standing before me as a judge in NSW it would be my duty to sentence you to death. The legislature here is more merciful perhaps but it has never the less armed me with power to deal with you severely. I cannot conceive a worse case or one more richly deserving the full penalty of the law than in this case. You both must be imprisoned for life.”)
Minyon Falls
The boy in a blue raincoat, the father in a red. Both take a piss in the bushes side by side. A kookaburra is nearby. The boy skips every few steps as they walk , his joy irrepressible at being outside the car. They are walking to the water fall through the rain-forest.
Before this the parents have yelled, the both of them, at various times at the eight year old. They suggested he sit in the middle of the back seat to get a view out through the front windscreen. But would he listen? No. Stubborn to the point of car sickness again.
Then he started groaning, moaning, driving them nuts.
The boy doesn’t get what excites his parents about driving through the country side. The miles of small roads they choose to Ooh and Ahh at. Every for sale sign gets a new intake of breath and a scribbling of estate agent names and numbers.
But where are the shops? asks the boy. No shops.
Just wet roads, damp boggy earth. Tree canopies that meet over roads, like fingers interlocking, making a tunnel of leaves. Wet. Ferns. No doubt full of leeches. Primitive plants. Everything here is dripping. The ground squelches, so water logged it oozes. It is like walking on foam. There is moss. Imagine that. Moss. She hasn’t seen moss for the longest time.
Because they live in Fremantle. Land void of moss. Flat, dry and hot. Hot and windy. Windy and hot. Water is scarce. The Water Board recommends three minute showers. People have fake grass. Roads don’t wind. They are straight and hot and baking. People’s suburban gardens have palms, yellow and crisp. Like they dream of an oasis. Grass turns yellow and then brown. Water sacrificed to sand slips off, repelled, afraid.
The parents long for rain, for moisture. They watch the falls, the way the water, in endless buckets, spill over the rocks. Mesmerised by gallons of the stuff. The spray comes off it and turns to mist and all the air about is liquid and cool.
from “Disquiet” by Julia Leigh
The boy had a go. He planted himself on the ground and kicked at the door. He kicked and kicked, first a hard low kick and then a one-two kung-fu kick. He took a few steps back and, like a high jumper, standing on the balls of his feet, gathering concentration, he readied for a run-up: he launched himself against the door. At the point of impact there came a dull thud. He did this again. Over and over, uncomplaining. He picked himself up, wincing and walked back to his starting position, lifted his heels, ran at the door. But the door was oak and he was boy: his shirt was torn and bloodied. He snuck a glance at the woman and with a slow blink she encouraged him to continue. In the end he forced an opening.”
from ‘So Long, See You Tomorrow” by William Maxwell
“When my father was an old man, he surprised me by remarking that he understood what my mother’s death meant to me but had no idea what to do about it. I think it would have been something if he had just said this. If he didn’t it was possibly because he thought there was nothing he or anybody else could do. Or he may have thought I would reject any help he tried to give me. As a small child I sometimes had the earache, and I would go to him and ask him to blow cigar smoke in my ear. He would stop talking and draw me toward him and with his lips almost touching my ear breathe warm smoke into it. It was as good a remedy as any, and it was physically intimate. One night – I don’t know how old I was, five or six, maybe – bedtime came and I kissed my mother good night as usual and then went over to my father and as I leaned toward him he said I was too old for that anymore. By the standards of the time and that place I expect I was, but I had wanted to anyway. And how was I to express the feeling I had for him? He didn’t say then or ever. In that moment my feeling for him changed and became wary and unconfident.”
the chook house 