Her Writer's Blog

Tatty and the Snapping Dragons

2009-07-29T21:27:00.008+10:00

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Grandma tied Tatty’s hair on top of her head in a dancer’s bun.

“Ow, not so tight.”

“Please stop wriggling. You need dancer’s hair,” Grandma told her.

Tatty pulled on new pale pink ballet tights.

“Mind how you go Tatty, you’ll make a hole,” tutted Grandma.

Tatty stepped into her pale pink leotard.

Tatty’s ballet shoes had once belonged to her Mum. Dad helped her criss-cross the satin ribbons around her ankles.

“There you go, little Ballerina,” he said.

“Oh just look at you,” Grandma cooed.

Tatty looked in the mirror.

She went to her dress-up box, and added a sparkling beady necklace, and some feathers.

“That’s better,” said Tatty

“Ballerina’s don’t look like that,” tutted Grandma, as she shoo-ed Tatty out the door.

The ballet school smelt like the inside of Tatty's ward-robe. Grandma introduced Tatty to her teacher, Ms Margo.

Ms Margo was very loud. Tatty wanted to cover her ears when Ms Margo yelled Hello Florence to Grandma, and hollered Well, well, well! at Tatty, and then shrieked So, you are our little ballerina! Instead of covering her ears, Tatty wished she could go home.

But Tatty could not go home. Ms Margo showed her a small white cross on the floor.

“THIS IS WHERE YOU STAND!” she hollered. Tatty stood exactly on her cross, her feet carefully together. Other children, all wearing pale pink leotards and tights like Tatty’s stood on their crosses too.

Ms Margo clapped her hands, and everyone stopped talking. Tinkling piano music filled the air.

Very elegantly indeed, and in perfect time to the music, Ms Margo pointed a toe to the front, slid it to the side, and then to the back. Everyone copied her.

Everyone except Tatty.

Tatty touched the feathers at her neck for courage. She screwed her toes into a point, and slid her foot to the front.

But somehow she did not know what to do next.

Ms Margo’s arms swayed above her head like a graceful tree. Everyone moved their arms like breezy branches.

But not Tatty.

“Like THIS Tatty,” yelled Ms Margo, and she placed her hands around Tatty’s wrists.

But when Ms Margo let go, her breezy branches fell straight back to her sides.

Tatty wanted to go home even more than before. She did not want to be a ballerina after all.

Her eyes prickled with tears.

Then Ms Margo clapped her hands, and the music stopped.

“IT’S TAPPING TIME! Ballet shoes off, tapping shoes on!” she bellowed.

Grandma helped Tatty to take off her ballet shoes. “Don’t feel sad Tatty, it will be better next time.”

“No, I don’t think so,” whispered Tatty. “I don’t want to do ballet anymore.”

Tatty did not have any tap shoes because she was learning to be a ballerina.

Ms Margo whispered loudly in Grandma’s ear.

“I suppose so,” said Grandma.

Ms Margo went to an old wooden cupboard, painted with silver stars and moons. She opened the door with a creak, and took a black velvet bag tied with a silver ribbon from a shelf. “This is for you!” she told Tatty.

Tatty looked inside the velvet bag. A delicious smell, like raindrops on a warm road, floated out to her. Tatty breathed it in and reached in to something gleaming.

It was a pair of Tap Shoes.

The toes were scuffed, with flakes of silver paint missing. They were creased and bent. But on the worn soles Tatty felt the gleaming slivers of silver metal shiver with the memory of many thrilling, noisy dances.

“Oh!” whispered Tatty. “They are beautiful!”

“They need a good coat of paint,” tutted Grandma.

But Tatty thought they were just right. She slipped her feet into the shoes, and tied the ribbons. They moulded perfectly around her feet. Their silvery taps went clicky-clack on the polished wooden floor as Tatty joined the class.

Then she remembered, “But I can’t dance.”

“The shoes will know what to do Tatty. They are full of dancing,” said Ms Margo.

Tatty thought she felt something trembling in the shoes. Maybe Ms Margo was right.

Ms Margo clapped her hands. Wild, fiery music filled the room.

Ms Margo pointed her toe: Click.

Her foot slid to the side: Sw-i-i-ish.

She stamped her feet together: Clunk. Clunk.

Everyone copied her. Even Tatty.

Click. Sw-i-i-ish. Clunk. Clunk.

Ms Margo waved her arms like a whole forest of trees in the wind, she clunketty-clunked and clicketty-clicked her feet in time to the rolling, rollicking music. And so did Tatty.

Click. Sw-i-i-ish. Clunk. Clunk.

Clicketty, swishedy, clunketty, clunk!

Tatty danced faster and faster, her arms moving like the wind, and her feet glittering and roaring like two snapping dragons.

At the end of the dance the wild music stopped. Tatty was puffing and hot, but she had a big smile on her face. Ms Margo winked at her, as she curtsied gracefully to the class.

“Excellent work class. See you next week!” she bellowed, but she was looking right at Tatty. Tatty looked back at Ms Margo.

“SEE YOU NEXT WEEK MS MARGO!” everyone shouted. Even Tatty, and she felt her silvery tap shoes give a little snapping shiver of excitement on her feet.

Salinity

2009-07-24T16:29:00.004+10:00

Watery sunbeams raked the water, but I could not see the seabed, or the surface, and I could not tell which way was up. The ocean, under its grey wrinkled surface, was as green as a peacock’s neck. I hung which-ever-way-up in the sea’s strange emerald light, and strands of pearls bubbled from my nose and mouth. ‘Is this drowning?’ I wondered, as it began to hurt in my chest. Just before I’d been teaching Salina to swim in the shallows where doll-sized waves rippled. Now the blue sky had been replaced by sea-grapes and swirling ribbons of seaweed.

I gave up trying to reach the surface, and then a few moments later I could not remember why I had wanted to. The sharp saltiness in the back of my nose stopped hurting and the beautiful shimmering green began to disappear from the water. As though the sun went down in a rush everything turned grey and then greyer, until there was only a soft, cosy blackness.

I was seven years old, the day I drowned, and it took my Uncle Brian seven puffs of air to bring me back to life. I sucked in lung-fulls of sea-damp air with a gasp, and vomited salty water down my neck and into my ears. I could feel the prickles and wetness where Uncle Brian’s mouth had been on mine. Gritty sand scratched my back, and the stinging tickle of stinking black seaweed scraped the bare skin of my legs, but I lay a little longer wondering what would happen next. The next sound I heard, as I lay there getting over drowning, was that of my mother crying.

‘My baby, my little baby!’ she was sobbing, and then, ‘Hopeless. You’re just plain hopeless!’ My Dad had been minding me while she sat in out of the cold. Other voices were talking and someone put a towel around me and I lay there until I felt warmer and had left it long enough so I wouldn't have to say sorry for causing all the fuss.

Then I smelt my favourite smell in the whole world drifting on the breeze: hot chips with salt and vinegar. I surprised them all by sitting straight up and opening my eyes. ‘Hello there!’ I said in a watery voice. The world looked bluer than I remembered. My mother didn't say anything, she had to go and sit in the car. But my Dad hugged me with a teary grin and promised to find my doll if it took him all night.

Uncle Brian carried me up the beach. I was embarrassed to be pressed so close to his tanned chest smelling of coconut and sweat, so I closed my eyes again. His tightly coiled chest hairs prickled my skin. He bundled me into the back of the car, and he sat in the front with Mum and held her hand.

From the car I watched Dad wade up and down in the shallows, searching forSalina, his trousers rolled over his knees and his feet white in the half-light. He peered deep into the waves; their folding tops glowing silver and purple in the fading day. Only the backs of Mum and Uncle Brians’ heads kept me company and they talked in low voices only to each other, their heads close together.

My eyes stung, and my head swirled like I was back in the peacock-green ocean. I ate my chips one by one, and hoped Salina would float into Dad’s outstretched fingers. I imagined Dad’s hands with soft webs stretching between his fingers like a Mer-man’s.

Mum and my uncle were talking, and from the tone of their voices I could tell I wasn’t meant to be listening. After a few moments Mum moved away from him and her fingers drummed in sharp rhythms on the shiny, black steering wheel. ‘You are dangerous for me, Brian,’ she said at last. ‘I shouldn’t be left alone with you.’

By the time my chips are gone, Dad will find Salina, I thought. I ate slowly, and when the cup was nearly empty I licked the salt from my fingers. Salty tears oozed from my eyes, and dripped into the cup, plop, plop, plop.

I thought, I am full of the sea. I am salt.

The first stars were appearing when Dad finally came up the foot-track. Empty handed. Uncle Brian leapt out of the car, ‘Any luck?’ he asked in a booming, cheery voice. Dad did not answer him. He knelt at the rear door, and put his hand on mine. ‘I'm sorry, little mite,’ he said. His skin was strangely grey and moist looking, and his trousers dripped into the dust of the car park. ‘Salina has gone. She’s gone to live with the mermaids.’ I looked at his big white hand. It was wrinkled and cold like something dead, something bloated with water, not webbed like a Mer-man’s should be. I looked away, pulling my hand from under his at the same time. An aching in my throat would not let me talk.

Mum started the car, and revved the engine impatiently. ‘Sorry love,’ she said. She looked over her shoulder into the back seat for the first time. ‘You were too old for a dolly, any how,’ she added, lighting another cigarette with a glowing coil of wire. My uncle Brian got in the back with me while Dad started the car. ‘Chip tax,’ he said with a chuckle, stealing the longest chip I’d been saving and that was now soggy on one end from my tears. ‘Well, Frank, that was quite a trip to the beach, hey!’

The very next Sunday, when he came to take my Mum out to lunch, Uncle Brian gave me a new doll. She came in crinkly, purple paper with a wardrobe of little clothes. She had such long, smooth hair that I hated her a bit for being so beautiful. My own hair was not long and it was never smooth, it frizzled up in the rain. I spent hours in my room with the door shut on the silence of Dad left alone in the house, arranging her tiny clothes on pale yellow plastic hangers. I could not think of a name so didn’t call her anything. I told her that in life there were many things that were very dangerous, and especially warned her about the dangers of the sea, and she promised not to go anywhere near it. I cut her hair as short as mine to make it easier to look after.

One night at the end of summer Mum set the table in the dining room with Grandma’s tablecloth, the one embroidered with red strawberries normally used for Christmas or really fancy dinners. She spread it carefully over the polished wood and laid it with the best plates, arranging them on the table like a magazine ad. I put out the cutlery while Mum spent a long time making a roast dinner, sort of humming every now and then as she peeled and poked. Dad and I grinned at each other as everything came out to the table all piled onto our biggest platter. It looked and tasted like Christmas and I wondered if there would be pudding and ice-cream for dessert.

Dad and I were the happiest we’d been for a long time and I thought that Mum must be too. But after she finished picking at a chicken leg and baked potato she placed her knife and fork side by side in the exact centre of her plate, pushing some peas to one side. In the same voice she had used to ask Dad for the gravy, she said,

‘I'm leaving you Frank. Brian loves the girl like she was his own and he’ll give us both a good home.’ The fork on its way to Dad’s mouth stopped in its tracks. A spot of gravy landed on the table-cloth, making one of the strawberries look like it had a rotten patch in it. Then Mum just picked up her plate and left the table. In the darkened kitchen I heard her fumbling in her cigarette packet, and then theclick, click, click of her lighter.

At first nothing happened, then Dad slid his plate right across the table, ploughing the strawberries into thick rumples and folds. He kept pushing it right to the very edge and I watched it wobble, then fall. Globs of gravy, a slick brown carrot, and half a potato pattered onto the carpet. The lid came off the salt shaker and a drift of salt spewed out.

‘Is that how you tell me?’ he asked in a thin voice, but Mum just puffed away in the kitchen.

Maybe there was pudding, maybe not. I didn’t get any and that, plus the fact that Mum had ruined the lovely dinner, meant I hated her for a while then.

Mum and Dad stopped talking to each other apart from Dad’s thin sentences that started with ‘why…?’ and Mum’s angry, smoky nothings. When he was putting me to bed Dad told me he was trying to find the words to stop us leaving him. But Mum went from one room to another so she didn’t have to listen to him. The only happy person seemed to be Uncle Brian, who appeared in the house when Dad was not there and pretended I was playing a game where I was holding out on him and he had to guess the name of my new doll.

I had to pack my clothes and my toys into green garbage bags all by myself as Mum was too busy to help me. Dad cried when he saw them in my room. I couldn’t imagine Uncle Brian crying about that sort of thing. I told Dad not to worry, because I’d come back to see him all the time. That cheered him up a lot, he said.

Two days later it was me who found her. She was lying face down in a shallow sea of pinkly tinged bathwater, an empty container of strawberry bath-salts bobbing in the crook of her neck. Dad came and the lid of the toilet creaked as he sat on it, next to the bath. My Mum lay so still in the water, like she was sleeping. Then Dad began to cry, but differently, like something was jammed up inside. His noises reminded me of some sort of small animal. I pressed to his side and patted him as lovingly as I could. He pointed out my new doll lying with wet hair and a squashed arm in the bottom of the bath. ‘A bloody doll!’ he cried. ‘She slipped on a bloody doll!’

Water dripped from the tap into the pink water, …plunk, …plunk, …plunk. The water around her head was redder than raspberries but pinker than tomato sauce. Darker outlines of crimson outlined sea-weedy shapes where her hair fanned in tendrils around her head. ‘Should we give her the Kiss of Life?’ I asked eventually, not liking to suggest out-right that we ask Uncle Brian to come and puff seven hot breaths into her wet mouth. ‘Too late Pumpkin,’ said Dad sadly. ‘It’s all too late for that.’

’Oh.’

Rather than look at Mum any longer I sat on Dad’s knee and looked over his shoulder at all the things lying around the sink. Mum’s toothbrush was pale blue, with stiff shiny bristles. Dad’s had soft, curved lashes for bristles. Mine was smaller with yellow flowers. We stayed like that a long time, too sad to move, until the first thin stars appeared out the window.

Much later, when everyone had left, Dad tucked me in and kissed my hair. He left the door open just the right amount and I snuggled in to Angel, my new dolly, and smelled her plasticky smell. I smiled to myself when I realised that Brian had been wrong to try and take us away, but a bit right about Angel – I had known her name all along. Angel, come to save me. She did not like to snuggle, this one, but I was beginning to like her plastic smell. I held her and licked the warm skin of my arm where Dad had cried onto it and it tasted like the sea. ‘Is your poor arm alright?’ I asked Angel. ‘Did clumsy Mummy tread on you and hurt your little arm?’ It was still a little flattened and had a line like a scar on its plastic surface. I kissed it tenderly. ‘I'm glad we won’t have to leave Dad now,’ I whispered to Angel. ‘From now on it will be just him, you and me… thank you for saving me Angel.’

River Beach

2009-07-23T22:09:00.003+10:00

Out on the Bass Straight a strong southerly was blowing. It whipped the tops off the waves and vaporised them, tossing them out like bridal veils for an ocean of salty brides. Solitary ocean gulls surfed on the wind, continually on the look out for the next flash of briny-silver.

Closer to shore, the wind blew more softly. The sea breeze found its way through the heads of a river, and wound along banks that increasingly became edged with reeds. With the breeze came the scent of the sea. It twined around points and headlands, and arrived softly and pleasantly at a little pebbly beach, lined with paper bark trees and gravel clearings for cars.

A beach on a river is a particular place. When the tide is out it is more river than beach, home to pale creatures who nestle invisibly in the soft river mud or dart through the warm shallows. Reeds efficient at filtering salt are a haven for black swans, who bob amongst them and think themselves hidden when they draw their head under a tender wing. At high tide the swans reveal themselves and gather at the up-river end of the beach. Their presence there reminds you that the river-beach is closer in spirit to life further up-river where creatures have no notion of salty water.

But with each ebb and flow of the tide the push up-river of salt and the ocean means the river beach is always in a flux of mostly being river and yet not quite. Gulls soar and circle joyously over you as you sit on a striped beach towel enjoying the sun, and their cries create a link with the ocean. Invisible to your eyes are the tiny sea creatures who come in with the tide, stay a while and then depart with the outgoing tide. Do they, like us, enjoy the holiday-like interlude of a trip to the beach?

Daisy ran down the beach. Her Mum and her Mum's friends June and Deb carried the towels, baskets and their books.

“Aah, you can smell the sea today,” said Daisy’s Mum.

“I want to build a sand-castle to the sky,” said Daisy. “Then, I’m going to sit next to the water, and let the waves come and get me!”

“That sounds lovely Daisy,” said her Mum. “But first, come and get some sun-screen on.”

The water was far down the pebbly beach, exposing wilting sea lettuce and many holes made by crabs. The sand that far down the beach was not white, or even golden. It was mixed with river mud. “It’s as soft as pudding to walk on,” said Daisy’s Mum later when they walked along the beach.

June and Daisy ran down to the water to swim. June dived straight in. Daisy wanted to dive in too, but all she could manage was to wade in until the cold water reached her middle.

“Wha-hoo! Look at the frog Daisy!” called June, gall-umping through the water. Daisy laughed and forgot to be cold. She began gallumping with her. They played giant frogs. They played skimming dolphins and splashing whales. They played beautiful mermaids.

Daisy’s Mum, Kristi, watched them play while she looked at the river and breathed in the faint scent of the sea. Deb lay back on her towel with her book. “The tide is coming in I think,” Kristi remarked. The rising tide soon covered the green, weedy sand. Next, it covered up the wide brown river flats. “Oh, look the tide’s really coming in now,” she said to Deb, who laid down her book for a moment to look.

Soon, the tide had come in far enough for the black swans to bob in amongst the reeds, close to the end of the beach. “Don’t they look beautiful,” she sighed.

June flopped breathless and laughing on her beach mat. Daisy lay down right next to her. June told Daisy quiet stories about pelicans, frogs and whales. They watched seagulls diving for fish on the river.

Kristi sighed with happiness. “Oh, lovely day,” she said to no-one in particular.

Deb turned the pages of her book.

A march fly tried to bite Kristi’s legs. “Ow!” she said crossly. “I keep missing it,” and she slapped at her legs.

“I reckon,” said June, “that we ought to put our shoes on and go for a walk.”

“It’s trying me now,” said Deb. Slap!

“No,” said Daisy. “I’ve got a sore toe, and I want to go home.”

“I’ll piggy-back you then,” said June.

“No, I need to go home,” said Daisy. “- Oh, look at this beautiful stone. I know, let’s go pick up some beautiful, treasure-stones.”

“Okay, let’s go!” said June.

“Let’s all go,” said Kristi. And they walked along the beach, splashing through small, warm waves until the shadows lengthened, and the breeze coming from the ocean grew cool.

That night, when Daisy and her Mum and her Mum's friends had gone home, a silvery moon rose over the deserted river beach. A warm land breeze flowed back down the river, twisting and turning until it met the ocean. The black swan family bobbed amongst the reeds. They tucked their heads under their wings and settled for the night. The moon tucked itself in behind a bank of high dappled clouds, and the beach was bathed in shadow. It waited for the day.

But down where the sand was pudding-soft the gentle folding and unfolding of river waves was stirring up a party: ribbons and splashes of luminous effervescence prickled in the darkness as millions of tiny plankton danced along the waves and set off their tiny blue green lights. They had been born out at sea and pushed down the wide river with the incoming tide until they found themselves at the warm edges of the river beach. They celebrated all through night until, with the coming of the dawn, their tiny lights faded.

And all the next day, while other children played frogs, dolphins and mermaids amongst them, the tiny invisible plankton tumbled and sang in the rolling waves, enjoying their short beach holiday, and waiting for the turning of the tide that would take them home.

Poor Hank Fish

2009-07-23T20:24:00.013+10:00

Image taken from www.columbia.edu/.../austro.html

Nearly four million years before the present day a group of three bipedal hominids, possibly humankind’s earliest ancestors, walked together across an open plain, in what one day would be known as Africa. On this day the scent of recent volcanic eruptions would have been hanging in the air, the horizen studded with smoking cones. Their passing left a tantalising record, a trail of footprints imprinted in newly settled volcanic ash. By examining the nature of the prints, their size, shape and the distance between them, we know they walked upright. By comparing this data with skeletons dated from the same era we assign them to a group of bipedal hominids that were not tall, about half the height of us. We take (very) educated guesses that they belonged to two adults and a juvenile of the species australopithecine afarensis, and with our fingers crossed we claim these as our earliest ancestors.

Getting along on two legs as opposed to scrambling about on all fours had come about relatively recently in the scheme of things. The innovation had allowed the use hands for tasks other than mobility, and provided the advantage of a longer line of sight to catch a glimpse of game or scout for danger. It was the means for these early hominids to range further and further from the safety of the tree-ed places, and to take up the regular eating of meat to power their lengthier trips and to sustain a growing brain. Walking upright really did set them off on the path to becoming us.

In this manner, wonderfully free from the weight of their predestination over the next 3.7 million years, this little group walked on by, leaving nothing but footprints. It's a wonder they didn't stop and look back on them with amazement, maybe they did. The footprints remained in the ash long after it had become solid rock. The imprinted rock was covered by layer upon layer of soils over the millennia. Then the turnings of the earth and the relentless sweep of time removed the covering layers, grain by grain, sweeping them away until our groups’ signature footprints lay within reach of dainty pick and brush work by those inclined to such things.

A hefty 3.7 million years after first being laid down they were uncovered by someone very inclined to such things. Dust soaked anthropologist Hank Fish discovered a trail of fossilised footprints in the dry Tanzanian plains of Africa in the early nineteen seventies. They were the find of his life.

Aus – tral – o – pith – a - cine, Af – ar – en – sis, is how Celia first learnt to say their name when she was two. Celia Fish was only a babe in arms when the news of her father’s discovery entered the public domain. By the time she was six her father was a well-known Professor of Anthropology at Hobart University, inclined to give his views vociferously on local talk-back radio on matters not in the least connected with anthropology, and still touring on the strength of his one, great find. Celia’s mother had been an outspoken student. They fell in together, and managed to form an alliance held together by love and common understanding, ‘with no need what-so-ever for any medieval marriage ceremony’. Together they held sway over little Celia’s life, which she remembered in later years as a succession of ‘healthy differences of opinion’, or, as Celia remembers it, violent arguments.

Casts of the Hank Fish’s famous footprints were displayed in the Hobart Museum, set in a tasteful diorama featuring a dried, landscape representation. The interested public came for a look, bringing their children. A cursory glance in the anthropological room usually sufficed, before they wheeled their bonneted offspring off to the room containing the stuffed animals.

Celia went to see the impressive, twenty foot long panorama with her father on a regular basis. They took a cut lunch every Friday. When he was in an agreeable frame of mind Hank Fish explained the display in such interesting detail that young Celia could see the group, a family just like her own, like ghosts walking before her, the male in front and the female holding the young one’s hand.

On other occasions Hank paced moodily up and down, sucking on his filthy pipe, stopping periodically to peer over the red, silken rope at one section or another of the display. On one occasion, while Celia peered in the sodden brown paper bag, dissatisfied with tomato sandwiches and hoping for a biscuit, he climbed right over the rope. When Celia looked up, he was walking the diorama with carefully measured paces, at right angles to the line of footprints. When he reached the back of the display he knelt and scratched at the plaster there, and could be heard muttering to himself. Quite a little crowd gathered, and Celia was extremely ill at ease until he was ushered out by a kind but firm curator.

On walks to the park or along the street, where other children might carefully avoid treading on the cracks, dreams of the diorama and the ‘hom-in-ids’ who had left them, floated in Celia’s mind. She walked hand in hand with her mother, after ordering her grey haired father walk on ahead, ‘just like in Daddy’s footprints people.’

Hank Fish died when Celia was twelve. He had been ‘getting on’ for as long as Celia could remember, and had drunk much more than he should in the end. But still, she missed their Friday outings.

It was some time after this, roughly twenty-five years or so, that the whole mad project, as Celia called it, of Ben’s was born. It had begun not long after they had first met at university in 1990. Celia was a third year anthropological archeology student, following in the ‘footprints’ of her father. Ben was doing something complex with nano-particles for his PhD in physics.

Celia laughed when Ben, over first-date beers at their local, told her about his invention. ‘As you would,’ she defended herself, ‘if someone told you they had invented a time machine!’ Later that evening, Ben showed her how it worked, and how various objects could disappear and reappear at the turn of a dial. In an Einstein-theory-of-relativity-like demonstration, a clock reappeared three hours slower than it should have, and she was convinced. Not long after this night they declared themselves in love, and made plans to get married as soon as Ben finished his PhD.
As more time went by the prospect of the completion of the PhD, and consequently the wedding, seemed to be increasingly distant as funding for the former was continually refused, people actually laughing when Ben put forward his proposal.

Ben broached the idea with Celia during a crackling purple, window rattling storm one Sunday afternoon. They had filled the bedroom with candles, and were lying on the bed drinking vodka from small glasses. Celia tried her best not to let it worry her that Ben’s PhD had stalled at the starting posts, about all his work and incredible talent going to waste, but although she prided herself on her feminist position, a watered down version of her mother’s, she was secretly itching to start planning the wedding. Why, only that day she had given in to the urge, and her first bridal magazine was tucked out of sight in her bedside drawer, like some girls conceal a vibrator.

‘Everything will be all right, won’t it Ben?’ she asked. She wanted him to say something reassuring. Ben had quite a lot to say, as it turned out. Much of it was startling, and not much was reassuring, to Celia’s way of thinking. He laid out, piece by piece, a plan to send … someone … he paused meaningfully … back in time. He wanted to send … this someone … for increasingly longer periods, to times increasingly in the past, and when he was certain there were no ill effects … ‘

Celia moved away, to curl defensively at the foot of the bed, her arms tucked between her knees.

‘Yes, it’s you that gave me the idea, Cel. And your father.’

‘What idea? What do you mean?’

So he told her. He told her he was going to track down the exact moment when the famous footprints her father had discovered were left and film the whole event. Celia made no attempt at all to hide her disbelief.

Ben was not put off by her snorts of disgust. ‘Narrowing the time to a reasonable closeness, prior to actually sending you into the past is the critical part of the idea,’ he explained. Using a highly calibrated cycle of darting particle transportations, he had been able to do just this, he went on.

Celia gazed at him glumly, I'm going to marry this guy?

‘In order to actually pinpoint the right day I plan to send you back and forth, back and forth, you know?’

Celia managed a depressed nod. Yes, she knew.

‘… To have a look if the footprints are there, or not, and so on... ‘Eventually, after a … number … of trips the exact, right day will become clear,’ he explained, then fell silent.

Celia noted a look of … yes, expectant pride on his face. She curled into a tight ball. ‘Oh.’

Apparently encouraged, Ben went on. He told how he planned to make money selling the footage shot by Celia; money for his PhD, money for their wedding, and their … life … together. He faltered, waiting for a response. When Celia did not respond he reached down the bed and pulled her up beside him. Wrapping his arms around her he held her close to him. ‘Cel, Cel, only if you want to, okay? Only if you say yes.’ He kissed her cool cheek, and nibbled her ear-lobe. This never failed to make her giggle, despite her best efforts she could not stop herself. Ben explored other parts of Celia’s body, delighting her with his tender touch. Where words failed, caresses did not. She opened herself to him like a flower unfolding.

‘Yes, I'll do it,’ she had murmured sometime later, that stormy Sunday afternoon, when they were lying sated, wrapped in rumpled sheets.

That is how she came to be huddled now, shivering, in the long, dry grass of an ancient landscape that in about three point seven million years time would be called Tanzania. About to come face to face with her ancient ancestors, ‘…That’s the idea anyway,’ she muttered to herself.

The journey, if that was the right word, for Celia was never sure what to call it, had gone smoothly, with minimal disorientation this time. She had woken dazed in the transportation pod, with no idea of who she was, or where she was, which was disconcerting, but normal. The glowing red images passing before her eyes had still taken a few minutes to register in her fuzzed brain, but gradually the carefully designed symbols and letter combinations had done their work in her cerebral cortex, and other susceptible parts of her frontal lobes.

She checked her equipment again. Weird how all that shiny metal suddenly looked so completely out of place. Rising to her knees, she held the video camera to her eye and panned along the sunlit plain, and the small rise nearby; focusing on the open stretch of ash and mud running along the nearly dry riverbed. The stale, earthy smell of the dark mud wafted to her, carried by a gentle breeze. Turning the video camera towards herself she began to speak in a quiet, serious tone;

‘Celia Fish, speaking to you from three point seven million years ago in a place that will one day be … Tanzania, Africa.’ She paused. ‘When you hear these words, you will know that, however hard it is to believe what I am saying, I am speaking the truth. I will bring back soil samples, insect specimens …,’ she waved away a group of flies intent on exploring the corners of her eyes, ‘… we’ve been putting up with flies for a long time it seems.’ She paused again for the imagined polite laughter.

‘And I will bring back video footage of one of the earliest human, or humanoid, activities known to … man and woman kind today. A family, out for a walk together. A famous family, you could call them our First Family. I bring you the Australopithecine Afarensis Family Outing!’ Turning the camera off, she smiled to herself as she sank back into her grassy covering. ‘Corny, melodramatic, just perfect.’

Setting the camera on its tripod, she busied herself for some hours gathering test-tubes of different soils, and then grasses and the odd leafy twig, and made detailed notes. She tucked the test tubes of specimens one by one into the pockets of her field bag, and settled down to wait.

She waited a long time, and fleeting doubts as to time and place began flitting through her mind, although her previous brief trips had, without a doubt, narrowed both down to this day, and this place. Then she became aware of the rustling and cracking of grasses. Her pricked ears caught sounds of life approaching; soft murmurs, rising and falling in tone. ‘Surely, it’s them?’ As the sounds grew louder Celia was amazed to find her-self listening for a recognisable word. The noises they made were definitely not human, but they were not like any chimp or ape she had ever heard. Celia held her breath; her eyes and the camera trained on the slight rise about ten metres away, over which she guessed they were about to appear.

It was them. When they appeared; the male first, the female following and holding the child’s hand and chattering while she walked, Celia was taken by surprise again, this time by their size. Even the male was only the size of Celia’s ten-year-old niece. The child, who she knew was thought to be six or seven, looked no larger than a three year old. Celia gazed at their sloping foreheads, receding chins and close-set eyes with wonder. ‘Can they really turn into us?' she asked herself, enthralled.

While she was busy with these thoughts her hands were working on their own operating the video camera. Zooming in, she chose the best shots she could, wishing she could film from different angles. Still, it was fantastic how the sunlight was glinting through their reddish fuzzy hair, and a group of umbrella like trees and a smoking volcano in the distance provided a perfect backdrop.

That it should all flow so smoothly seemed incredible to Celia. The three Australopithecine Afarensis walked past, at a steady pace, across the muddy flat. She could even hear the male replying to the female’s chatter in an un-human, yet oddly familiar voice, and hoped the camera was capturing the sounds. Celia was so close she could actually hear the small sounds their bare feet made as they passed, leaving behind the oh so famous footprints.

They disappeared into the distance of place and time, leaving Celia in a state of total exhilaration. ‘We did it! It worked!’ she crowed. Barring some catastrophe she could not bring herself to consider, she had the proof they needed to prove that Ben’s idea was not crazy. ‘It won’t do me any harm either,’ she thought with a wry smile.

Celia had no more time to spend on these thoughts. The portal back to her own time would be closing soon. Ben had stressed the impossibility of being able to come back and get her if she missed it. Only he could operate the complicated machinery. As Celia had no desire to spend any long length of time four million years in her own past; she must get a move on.

She hastily gathered all her paraphernalia, zipped and clicked the various pockets and compartments, as she sped off towards the portal site. She checked her stopwatch, ‘Damn!’ There was less time than she thought. She set off at a jog, cutting across the nearly dry riverbed, her feet also making small sucky sounds in the mud and ash that released a stale, earthy aroma as she crossed.

Still some distance from the portal site Celia suddenly stopped as though she had run into something solid. She looked back the way she had just come, and followed the trail of her own footprints across the ash covered plain. ‘Oh bloody hell. No!’

For crossing the tracks so recently left in the mud by humankind’s earliest ancestors were others of a much later species. The imprints of Celia’s running shoes were also clearly defined in the soft ash, cutting straight across those of the First Family, making a complete mockery of the First Family Outing.

Celia sank weakly to the ground. She felt faint, and a bit sick. She tried to cry, but could not. Somehow she made it back to the portal in time to be shunted through the same configurations that had gotten her here, but in reverse.

1971 Tanzania

Image taken from www.britannica.com

About three point seven million years later it was another lovely day on the Tanzanian plain, although perhaps a little warmer than the one Celia had experienced. Hank Fish did not normally notice the heat, the flies seeking moisture from his orifices, or the thin trickles of sweat that ran continuously down his body; he was used to all that. But today Hank was less likely than ever to notice these things. It was the last week, of his last field trip, before beginning a life of relative ease back in Hobart, teaching at the university - and he was onto something! For the last few hours he had been working steadily, firstly with chisel, pick and gentle taps with his hammer, and now with fine brushes.

Hank leant back on his heels and surveyed what he’d just uncovered with a strange mixture of emotions; relief, pride and exultation were the three he could identify off the top of his head. It was three sets of footprints, two larger and a smaller, that Hank had revealed in the ancient stone layer before him. He felt certain they were very ancient indeed, and bipedal, for he could tell by the heel imprint, and no matter how hard he searched he could find no handprints. He suspected they were most likely Australopithecine. Possibly Afarensis or maybe his old mate Africanus. ‘What ever they are, they are just the ticket,’ muttered Hank happily. ‘Just the bloody ticket.’ He set back to it with a fine haired brush.

He allowed himself a little whoop of excitement as he worked. He would get Roy to help him analyse and catalogue them, he decided. He would call him on the two-way soon, but not just yet. The way Hank figured it, the rock bed seemed to continue quite a bit further, with only a light covering of sandy soil. He worked with mixed feelings as he remembered the time years ago when he had unearthed what turned out to be the find of the decade, the first africanus jawbone and skull fragments, only to have the leader of the expedition, and quite rightly so he knew, categorise it, publish and have accolades heaped on his insipid blonde head for ever after. ‘Just keep calm, old fellow,’ he told himself, and set to on a fresh patch of ground with his chisel, whistling cheerfully through his teeth.

A couple of hot, damp hours later, Hank stopped again. He sat heavily on a rock and wiped his brow with a damp pocket-handkerchief. Shaking his head slowly, he rested it in his hands, eyes closed. ‘No.’ Soon the solitary word filtered through his clenched fingers. ‘No! NO! It can’t be!’ His agony carried over the plain, but remained unheard. Similarly the clenched fist pounding the air beside him remained unseen.

Suddenly he leapt up and ran to the Land Rover. He wrenched and pulled until the side mirror broke off in his hands. He ran back to the site and knelt down with the mirror and tried a couple of different angles. There was no mistaking it, (a tear of frustration trickled slowly down his cheek); neat, even whirls, a few millimetres apart, spreading about eight inches by three inches. At one end, clearly reflected in the mirror, a single word; ‘Nike’ and underneath it the digits ‘8 ½’.

This footprint was not ancient; it clearly belonged to a member of his own species. And if this footprint is not ancient, then all these other footprints, reasoned Hank, were obviously monkey or ape, and were obviously baked hard quite recently by the fierce African sun. How could he have been so wrong? Nothing made any sense anymore. He repeated the word ‘obviously’ to himself a few times to try it out, but it just wasn’t obvious to Hank at all. Not at all. He sat with his head in his hands again, and re-evaluated his future. He sat for some time.

Hank was very handy with a pick. He was equally handy with a chisel. It did not take him long at all to do what he decided had to be done. He spent longer ensuring that his work could not be detected, that the sandy gap in the length of footprints appeared as a fault line where natural erosion had taken place. He assured himself the interruption to the footsteps would scarcely rate a mention. He would ensure it did not.

When he was finally, quite satisfied that his handy work was beyond detection, it was late. The sky was stained a bloody orange on the horizon and Hank Fish flung his tools into the back of the truck. They struck the tail-gate with a sour, metallic clanging. As he drove slowly away from the site Hank noticed a nasty taste in his mouth, one no amount of water from his canteen seemed to be able to wash away.

2009-07-22T17:20:00.000+10:00

The Peace of Forgetting

2008-02-17T21:27:00.000+11:00

It was some time before Jack realized that he had fallen out of bed and was lying on the floor. He could hear an urgent high pitched beeping through the hands he had clasped over his ears. The carpet was rough against his face and he faintly enjoyed the sensation, pressing his cheek into the thin pile, focusing on the dryness, the prickliness and the hardness that lay underneath. He was pleased to feel this prickling and pressed harder still, pushing his cheek into the imagined grit and dust. It had been so long since he’d felt anything inside that a prickling on the outside felt good. “I am a numbed shell,” he thought, pulling the description from some half forgotten thing he’d read. And now, instead of beginning to get better, less numbed, it was going to be worse than before. Before, every day began as a sweet mystery, but now he would always wake knowing everything. He would be sure exactly where he was and why he was there; why his hands shook. But the worst bit of all was knowing that he’d had her, his sweet little Doe, and he’d lost her. And he supposed it was all his fault. So now what little peace there had been in his life in not remembering anything was gone for good.
*
Jean’s hair was glowing around the edges where all those wispy bits she did her best to tame were catching the light. Jack leaned across the picnic blanket, caressing her soft cheek lightly with the back of his hand. She smiled her quiet half-smile and closed her eyes for a kiss. He leaned closer and inhaled the scent of violets and something else. Then the delicate scent-tendril swirled away again. His nostrils flared and he sniffed loudly, seeking the smell like a dog sensing a bitch on heat. Jean squirmed against him, embarrassed perhaps. He kept sniffing and found its delicate beginnings between her fabric clad breasts. He drew the scent to him through the cloth, sucking it in as fast as it would come, until it filled his head like strings of spaghetti with purple violets, bruised green stalks and… something else, something that makes him gag... He knows that smell holds the key and if only he could work out what it was he’d know everything – brrrrrriiiiiiiiinnnng….!!

Jean disappeared, stripping her perfume from his head as the alarm-clock’s insistent call pulled him out of one time and into another. He fiddled with the little lever on the back of the clock. The ringing persisted, slowly lowering in pitch as the springs inside wound down. Jack knew it would soon stop, so he put it back on the table next to the bed to die a natural death. He sat and waited, and while he waited he tried to bring back the scent of the perfume, the nice part in the middle of the dream. Did it have a name? If it did he could buy himself a little bottle, to dab on his pillow or on a corner of his handkerchief sometimes. Once he’d gone into one of those fancy shops that sold nothing but perfume and tried them out until his nose had been full of smells and his eyes began to water. It hadn’t taken long before they’d all smelled the same.

Bri-iim-iim-errrng…nk… The clock died; a new day had begun and Jack had absolutely no idea what it would bring. So he sat on his bed and waited.

At 7.05 the door opened and an efficient looking woman bowled in. She appeared to be a nurse. “Good morning Jack love,” she said cheerfully, and she helped shift him into a chair, which was good, for his whole body felt stiff and weak. She tore open the floral curtains and whisked the bed-covers up neatly. He’d never seen the room he was in before, some sort of hospital room he supposed and he didn’t much like it. Not enough room to swing a cat once the bed, drawers and bookshelf had been crammed in. He wracked his brains but he couldn’t remember any of it.
The nurse began talking about a lovely shower, like it was to be the treat of his day. He was about to ask her where he was when the nurse told him, in the sort of voice that made you realize she’d said it before: “You live at Sunnybrae Park, and have done for ten years, since your wife passed on. Today is Tuesday and that means steak ‘n’ kidney for lunch. Oh, and Isabel will visit this afternoon after lunch.” She finished this statement by transferring him to a plastic chair on wheels and loading up his lap with a bath-robe and a pair of slippers.

Three things came to him as he was wheeled down the corridor to for his lovely shower. Apparently he had been living in this hospital type place for ten whole years. It felt like the first morning of the first day. And his darling Jean was dead. “Have I had a turn? Why don’t I know all those things?” he asked, his voice quavering a little. “No dear, you’re as fit as a fiddle. Here we are then!” She removed the dressing gown and slippers, placing the former on a hook and the latter neatly on a bench near a stack of towels. Looking down he was horrified to see his todger poking its way out the front of his pyjama fly. Luckily the nurse didn’t seem to notice anything; she was too busy peeling his clothes from his body.
*
Jean was lying on their bed, her blond hair fluffing around her head most prettily. She had allowed the strap of her negligee to slip beguilingly off one shoulder. Her mouth was pouty and little dimples decorated her cheeks. One eye was nearly closed with an ugly purple swelling building up around it. She’s a wily one, that one, he thought as the little tears trickled down the inside of her nose. All those feminine ways that she knew would work with him and she played them all out like a regular card shark. He checked the straps around her wrists and ankles again. The skin on her ankles looked papery and worn so he loosened them off a little. “Right now, little Dove?” he asked her as kindly as he could but Jean wouldn’t answer. She just turned her face away from him.

Jack had finished lunch, Steak ‘n’ Kidney pie – his favourite, and had settled into his chair for a bit of shut-eye when the door opened. A woman dressed in a blue dress bellowed from the doorway: “Cuppa Jack? An’ would ya like a couple o’ bickies n’ all?” Reluctantly he pulled himself back from the dream of his and Jeans’ bedroom, and into the world where he was reclining in a comfortable armchair, dozing after lunch. He began pulling at the rugs on his lap but found it difficult to make his legs get a good grip on the floor. “No love, don’t you get up, I’ll bring it to ya, okay Jack? Here ya go darlin’ – I’ll just pop ‘em down ‘ere on yer little table for ya.” A cup of milky tea landed with a jangle beside him, with two biscuits resting in the saucer: a Scotch Finger and a teddy-bear. He liked a Scotch Finger.

Jack nibbled on his biscuit and looked around him. He wondered where he was, and how he’d got there. Something must have happened in the night. I dare say someone ‘ll come in soon and put me in the picture, he thought starting on the teddy-bear. The tea was milky and sweet, and he noticed his hand shook terribly when he lifted the cup. With a start he noticed a picture of himself and Jean in a frame on a fancy looking television set in the corner. He hadn’t seen the shot before, but there they were sitting up there like dickey-birds. In the photo he had a glass of aged malted in his hand and Jean had that look on her face. “Aah, Jeannie,” he smiled, shaking his head. She’d never liked him taking a drink.

Jean stared back at him, brave enough to meet his eye for once. And as looked at her face so soft and accusing a low rumbling noise started in his head. He turned hot all over as the noise in his head went from a rumbling into something thunderous with a regular clack, clack. The vibrations loosened the already tenuous hold of his fingers on the cup of tea, depositing both cup and tea into his lap. This happened almost unnoticed by Jack, as it was at the same time, and with a start of relief, as he realized the noise was coming from outside his window not from within his own head. “It’s okay, it’s just a train, it’s just a train,” he whispered as it thundered past, just beyond the car-park. It was a long one and Jack forced himself to watch its entire length as it passed, with only the voile curtains at his window for protection and his shirt sticking to his under-arms. Diesel fumes trickled in through the window and past the voile curtains. The smell made him gag. If there was any smell and sound in the world that he hated, that was it.

After the train had passed the world was very still. It was a few moments before his breathing calmed, and when it did he noticed a warm wetness seeping through his rug and trousers. He was at first pleased and then annoyed to find it was his cup of tea in his lap. He mopped at the damp with a few tissues from the box on the small table to his left. Damn tea is so bloody tepid m’ goulies didn’t even get a moment of excitement out of it either, he thought. His small chuckle sounded a bit croaky, a bit weak.

While he was finishing his not very effective mop-up three quiet knocks on his door revealed a fresh faced young woman who came in and took the vacant chair on the other side of his bed. She placed a white floppy hand-bag sporting a number of brassy buckles and straps haphazardly on the end of his bed. Her mouth was set in a thin line and she was more interested in what her finger-nails were doing than in looking at him. Jack stared at her while trying to unobtrusively refold the lap-rug. “Yes?” he asked abruptly. “What’s the story then?”
“It’s Isabel,” she said.
“Isabel?” asked Jack, he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“Isabel, I’m your daughter-in-law … Dad. I married Steve. Your son, Steve?” her voice rose insistently.
“Oh Gord, now what?” Jack put his hands to his head. What-ever next. She was no daughter-in-any-way of his. She’d got the wrong room. She wanted her head read like all the rest of them. But then this Isabel pushed her bag to one side and moved to sit on the end of the bed. She just sat there awhile, weaving her fingers and still not looking at him. Let her sit there, I’m beyond trying to work out why people keep bursting into other people’s rooms, thought Jack. Anyway, if I have to look at something it might as well be her. Jack was not beyond appreciating the appeal in a head of smooth blond hair and a tight pair of jeans.

Finally she looked at him. Gord. Her eyes, they’re as blue as Jean’s. She looked pale and a bit tired. “What is it now?” he asked in a voice with a little catch in it. Damn throat, always drying out. There was a jug of, no doubt stale, water and a glass. He motioned to it and Isabel poured him a glass. He took it shakily and managed a few mouthfuls.

“It’s about Steve. You do remember Steve don’t you?” Jack nodded; of course he did, although until that moment he hadn’t had him in his mind at all. “Fine lad, our Stephen,” said Jack. “Fine boy...” He tried to remember how old he’d be now… 8? 13?
“Yeah, well your fine lad has grown up now Dad.”
“Why call me Dad, I’m not your father am I?”
“No, you’re not my father… Look Jack, there’s no way of saying this that won’t seem brutal, so I’ll just say it. I don’t really know why I want you to know this, but I just do. Steve has been hitting me. Do you understand what that means Jack? He’s been hitting me, he’s angry all the time and he gets drunk. I mean really drunk, so he can’t remember what he did the night before drunk. That’s when he really hurts me the most, when he’s stone cold drunk. God Jack, why would he do that?…”

Tears ran down Isabel’s face and dropped off her chin into her moving, nervous fingers. Jack edged the box of tissues a little closer to her. “I – I wouldn’t have come to you, but I’m leaving him and I just thought you should know.”

“How old is he? How old is my son?” Jack started out of his chair. Isabel didn’t answer him. She pulled a tissue and dabbed at her face and under her eyes.

Then Jack, so quietly he almost whispered, told her; “I once knew someone who did that to a woman. What he did to her, well you wouldn’t treat a dog like that.” The words came out slowly, like each one had to be hand-picked. “He as good as killed her long before she really died. He took her spirit away, ‘nd she was as skittish as a new calf – scared of her own shadow. He as good as killed her years before.” His voice trailed away. Jack gathered the rug from his knee and brought it up to his chest. He closed his eyes, not wanting to remember any more, but the images were tearing through his mind, making the vibrating and the clack, clack, clack worse than ever. God, how he wanted something stronger than a cup of luke-warm tea.

“You’re talking about yourself, aren’t you? I knew it, Steve knows it too!” But I - I want to know what made her do it, what Stevie saw when he was a little kid? He wakes up from these horrible dreams… What else did you do to her, Jack?” What did you do to her so she lay in front of that train just to get some peace? Can you imagine the sound of it? The feeling of it?!” Isabel was shouting now, and there were voices in the corridor, a knocking at the door.

Jack could imagine the sound; he’d never forget the sound and even though he knew that Jean hadn’t felt it, he had felt it every time he’d heard a train and smelt that diesel smell. Every single time, he’d felt the flesh ripped from his bones and his body ground into he filth of the track. No wonder he’d had to forget it all. But no matter how hard his mind had tried to forget it, circumstances brought it back for him new and fresh every day. The sheer agony of it was brand new every day, every time that fucking train went past.

People were hustling Isabel out of the room. “This will just not do young lady… you’ll not be allowed back in here….. we’ll have to be calling the police….” At the doorway Isabel clung to the frame: “Jack!” She screamed at him to get his attention. Jack opened his eyes, hardly daring to look at her again. Her face had changed. “I’m not going to let you forget about this. Why should you have the peace of forgetting what everyone else can’t? Don’t worry, I’m leaving him, I’m not about to stay around until he kills me too!” And then she was gone, and soft cool hands stroked his hands, closed his curtains and helped him into fresh pyjamas.

The first thing he noticed was a chipped blue, metal cabinet with many drawers next to his bed. A machine was softly beep-beeping somewhere and the lights were soothingly dim. He was in a different room, a real hospital ward this time? He lay there a while, with the feeling his body had been stretched out until it was as thin and crisp as the tight, smooth sheets that enclosed him. The soft grey clouds that had padded his head for so long had also thinned and let everything back in. All the visions and memories that had been papered over were uncovered and no matter how he screwed his eyes up to stop them the things he’d done and said ten, fifteen years ago cranked up and started playing again.

There on his feet were his own white loafers covered in blood, he could feel again the pain of a broken toe, and the stumbling, secret trip to the railway line half carrying, half dragging the unbearable burden of Jean’s broken body while little Stephen, finally, lay in a fitful drug induced sleep back at the house.

“Oh my God… my God…” gasped Jack, now remembering everything that had been blocked out for all these years. He fought the tight, white sheets and managed to pull his knees up to his chest. A machine began wailing in protest.
*
Jean was beyond screaming, perhaps she’d figured that the sound of her screaming or whimpering was part of what spurred him on. She’d curled herself into a tight ball in the corner between the stove and the place the brooms and mops rested against the wall. He was having a dickens of a job to get her out. Her dress was torn, that pretty floral one she’d been so proud of. He remembered her prancing about the place with the little straw hat perched on her head. Pity she’d let herself go. Jack took another swig, and the warmth felt good in his throat. “Get out of there bitch,” he swore, using a broom handle to put a gap between her and the wall. She let out a little moan, and Jack remembered the pity he used to feel for her. “Come on Little Dove, come on out to Jackie. I’ll look after you,” he crooned in a loving voice. But Jean stayed curled in the corner, weeping silently.

“What’s wrong with Mum?” came the thin voice of Stephen from the kitchen door. “Get outa here little brat!” yelled Jack, furious. “Your Mum’s not well, she’s having a rest here in the corner – you get out!” Jean still wouldn’t come out so Jack started nudging her with his foot, just a bit at first, but then with more force. He’d get the silly cow to move. He kept kicking until she stopped crying at last and lay more loosely in the corner, her head resting against the mop handle. Jack looked around the kitchen. The colours looked different, like they were fresh out of the paint pot. But Stephen was still in the doorway, one hand twirling his hair, the other up to his mouth with his thumb inside. His pyjamas had little rabbits on them.

“I told you to get out… I told you…” moaned Jack, his throat dry. The scent of Jean’s perfume was on his hands. He could smell it, and for a moment he enjoyed the scent that always reminded him of violets and the deep green of freshly cut grass. Then he gagged, as the perfume notes became intertwined with the stench of blood and shit seeping from Jean’s prone body. He just made it to the sink in time to vomit. Then the rest of the whisky went down like water.

Dear God...

2007-12-28T19:08:00.000+11:00

Today I met one of your beloved: someone more precious to you than a bird of the air or the grass of the field. You will be pleased to hear she seemed quite content with her lot, although I dare say you know better than I. This is how it went:

We meet in the biscuit isle, where she smiled at my daughter and then confesses to me, "My dogs like those Hundreds and Thousands biscuits, for a treat. I just give them one when I go our, or before bed. Just for a treat."

I am hesitating over sesame seed or cracked pepper water-crackers. Warmed by her unexpected friendliness in a place where I usually pretend I am alone, I scan the shelves with her. We spot the pink lovelies hidden by a notice- they are on special.

Biscuit choices made on both sides I move on to tinned fruits and vegetables. "We keep running into each other!" she says with a brittle laugh as we steer our trolleys around each other, moving in opposite directions. She is in her mid sixties I guess. Her grey hair short and layered flatly over her head, her aqua cotton knit top neatly pressed, her stretch trousers likewise pressed with a sharp crease down each leg. Very respectively presented God.

I stop before a splendid variety of tinned tomatoes wondering at supermarkets as a place to meet people. When I was still single they were recommended. But I failed to see then, and I still do, how increasingly awkward encounters, laced over an acreage of increasingly intimate household products could be a good way to begin a meaningful relationship. Remembering the eating habits of my husband when I first met him I consider the frozen-food section the most promising.... a handsome man with lonely eyes in a crumpled cotton shirt and I, both reaching for the same bag of Potato Gems.... mmm.

At the dairy cabinet we meet again. She is clutching her trolley and staring into the tubs of margarine. "Ah, we need butter," I say, pulling my trolley in beside hers and pleased to have my memory jogged. I prefer to shop spontaneously God. I don't bother with a list, liking the 'memory jogging' mode of shopping, although I often do arrive home without some vital staple. The owner of the little dogs appears at a loss, and I lean past her with a smile, reaching decisively for the Dairy Soft Blend butter, low salt, able to be spread straight from the fridge.

She heaves an enormous round container, decorated with orange and yellow daffodils from the shelf. Surely it contains enough margarine for a family of 6 for a month? "We always used to get this one... when my husband was alive," she told me. "Aah, right," I reply, my tub of butter poised over the trolley. "Of-course, he preferred butter but we used to have this."

Beneath this simple statement I hear what I am sure you have heard so many times before, God. I hear her tell me it wasn't her fault he died so young, how she did her best to keep him off the dairy, but he did so love his cream, his sausages, his bacon. She coughed, a loose wet cough. A 'productive cough' I would have described it to a doctor. She should give up the cigarettes, I thought. All that trouble to get him onto mono-unsaturated daffodil decorated margarine, and there she was killing herself with cigarettes. "So now I usually get this one," she went on, holding up another smaller version of the same cheerful daffodil decorated margarine.

"Aah, that looks good," I say. I am ready to move on, but do not like to leave her to choose her margarine without support. "I'm sure it doesn't matter which you get if you only use a little," I offer as a way of encouragement. But she does not appear to hear me. She rummages in the shelving again, and pulls out another tub; dark blue, with a tape-measure print running around its perimeter. She scans the ingredients carefully, muttering them aloud and nodding. I offer the same argument again, "Yep, that looks a good one. Although if you don't use a lot it doesn't really matter." I regularly purchase butter myself, despite my husband's steadily increasing girth. Butter is at least naturally yellow.

She appears near a decision so I slowly wheel my trolley onwards; slowly, saunteringly so as not to appear uncaring. We meet two more times. Both times my daughter says gleefully, "Oh why do we keep meeting like this?!" Both times we smile at each other briefly before resuming serious, focused shoppper's faces. We are in the home cleaning and personal hygiene sections now, both matters obviously requiring individual consideration. We do not stop to discuss toilet-ducks or panty-liners. It is understood that these choices are a woman's to make alone. And God, I must say I felt more comfortable for her, knowing she should be on familiar ground now.

At the check-out I hear her cough, but I do not look around. Our brief acquaintanceship is over. We part our ways: I to my newly renovated, centrally heated house and my very alive husband; her to those two breathless little dogs, waiting with ears cocked on a worn linoleum kitchen floor for the arrival of the one who teases and loves them and can deny them nothing now they are all she has.

What tree is this?

2007-12-28T17:26:00.000+11:00

Name that tree... a tree it is easy to imagine dinosaurs chomping on, its branches perfectly arranged for climbing in this era. This picture taken at Tarra Warra Monastry, Victoria. A prize for the person who correctly names this tree!

Sisters@Sister's

2007-09-30T17:46:00.001+10:00

It is generally agreed that it's a relief to be heading away from careers and deadlines, and the shopping trips with perfect hair and make-up of the two previous 'Sister's Weekend', although the alternative isn't easily realized. Instead of 5am flights we make a slow seven hour trip, squabbling over the choice of music and stopping frequently. We pick up Niki from the airport in Launceston, fire-wood, shack-key, wine and beer, and $245 of gourmet groceries in Devonport. These we somehow fit into the crevices between suitcases and baskets over-flowing with a coffee maker, champagne glasses and a scrabble game. The only music we all seem to like, and enjoy singing along to, is The Best of the Eagles. We turn it up loud.

(At the Gateway, a place we recall as the largest bottle shop in the southern hemisphere, a blond woman in a red sports car smiled at us. I returned her smile, acknowledging it as a blessing on our girl's weekend. In the supermarket two spritely older women with neatly curled hair exclaimed, “You seem to be having so much fun we might just come with you!” We invited them along.)

After all that the trip is over quite soon, especially for Niki and Lise who crack open the slab between Burnie and Wynyard. I park the car on the soft grass growing in the space between the shack and the boobiala fringed beach. Opening the car door the heart-felt entreaties to Desperado to 'come to your senses' are replaced by the sudden near-silence of softly falling waves. The smell of the ocean fills my head, pushing the remaining residue of deadlines and meetings away over the Sister's Hills. I breath out slowly. Above us the sky is studded with a miraculous spread of stars. The Milkyway, that is our own galaxy on its side, is awash with all its billions of suns on display. While Alix unlocks the sliding glass door, and Lise and Niki follow her up the stairs to take a look, I take a moment more by the car and tell the stars a soft 'hello'.
Meanwhile Niki is inside, and is making excited sounds: “Wow! Oh wow!” and “This is fantastic!” she says, despite it still being pitch dark. Alix is groping her way around the walls and down the stairs looking for the fuse box – no mean feat in the labyrinth of rooms. Finally the switch is located and the power comes on. Niki is even more excited and resorts to jumping up and down on the spot for a while. Lise and Alix look at each other and wonder how long she can keep that sort of behavior up. I peer in at the objects pressed to the car windows like a sort of 'traveller's terrine' and wonder how on earth I'm going to find the energy to get everything out and into the shack.

*
“It's my turn to hold the 'fork 'n' candle'” says Niki. Our faces are glowing in the candlelight and the informal toasts have begun. Unloading the car is a distant memory. Lise's lemon and salmon pasta is delicious and had been generously preceded by beer and champagne and accompanied by a bottle of red. Niki grasps an ordinary, shack-quality stainless steel fork in one hand and an empty stubby with a lit candle embedded in its mouth in the other. This means she has the right to hold the floor with a minimum of interjection from the rest of us – although that doesn't mean much as the scale from minimum to maximum is very slight with we four. “To all of us,” she says, following the theme started by Lise; “who have within us so much that is amazing and beautiful, and who are able to find our own spirituality where-ever we want it to be!” We are all fairly pissed, and she may have said something else, but that's what I hear. This is a theme Niki and I have been tossing around for years so I pick it up gladly. “You're right!” I say. “Spirituality exists because there's something in us that, ...just yearns for it.” And I think again of the stars.

“My turn now! My turn to hold the fock 'n' cundle!” I try it with an Irish accent, pleased with how rude it sounds. They are passed across the table: “To us,” I start, waiting for inspiration to hit. “Because once a year we get together and remind each other of all our good points.” We drink to that, and for a while we talk about Lise's lovely skin that doesn't need make-up to look fresh and natural now she doesn't smoke. They tell me that I am the bar-raiser amongst us. I glow inside and encourage them to go on. “What do you mean?” I ask. “It's like you decide you want to do something, so you just go and do it. And you make it work!” They offer examples related to the various incarnations of my career, of interior decorating projects. I can think of others, but modesty refrain from mentioning them. I pass the fock 'n' cundle to Alix, but I don't take in what she says as I am contemplating just how my bar is really set. It's way up there! Why can't I make more choices that nudge it back down a little? If I could do that maybe life would be a bit easier, just a bit calmer and relaxed.

*
Walking along Sister's Beach, holding Lise's hand, my heels and the pebbles making the going tough, I see the moon rising out over the ocean. Bits of it escape the imperfect orb, spread by refraction so close to the horizon. It's engorged and swollen with light and is moving quickly. A piece of ragged cloud hangs over its face like a Magnum P.I. Mustache. I liken this mustachioed moon to Lise's new 'interest', Mike. Lise seems to like most things about her Mike but for his big black mustache. We christen him 'Mustachio Mike' for the night. I keep my eye on the moon and concentrate on not spilling the rest of my chardonnay. The moon continues to rise, soon leaving its mustache behind. Its shape is still not moon-like, it is testicle like and hence I christen it 'The Testicle of the Moon'. I enjoy this metaphor for the rest of our stumbling walk.

We return by the light of the rising testicle to our warm shack. Then Lise feels sick and is sick. We call her Cheesle, fetch her a basin, wipe her mouth, cover her with blankets and check on her regularly – hate for her to choke on her own vomit. She sleeps peacefully. Later my own bed is soft and envelopes me with such comfort I fall asleep with smiling thoughts of holding hands in an Irish Pub.

*
I am walking by myself down the beach. A soft rain is misting on my polar-fleece jacket and causing my carefully straightened hair to get in touch with it's inner nature-woman. Blue sky is on its way through a break in the clouds. The stumble-causing pebbles of the night before have become a beautiful sea of moist pinks, from palest to deep wine in the light of day. The sky and the ocean are perfectly compatible and work together accordingly. Toothy rocks rising like an old larva flow are actually as smooth as soap and, surprisingly for me green. Green with folds and swirls of caramel and cream, like jade or a poorly stirred paint-pot. “What rocks are these?” I ask, wishing my friend the rock expert was with me. “And why are the pebbles on the beach pink, and these green?” The green rocks are worn and smoothed. Where have the smoothed bits gone? Have they turned pink? Perhaps, once they're not attached to the mother rocks they lose their green sap. There's no-one to help me with these questions. I vow to ask my friend for a rundown on the rocks of this part of Tasmania.

At the end of the beach is a Brandy Creek. I suppose its real name is Sisters Creek. I love the way the brown water is mixing with the aqua-clear ocean water. I follow it's path slowly up the beach. The tide is out and the brandy creek has been working hard to cut itself a new creek-bed through the sand. As I watch chunks of sand crack and crumble into the rushing brown water. I love the chunky layered edges, like shortbread cut with a knife. “How fast does it make its creek-bed?” I wonder. With the toe of my shoe I make a long wavering line along the crumbling edge, about 50-60cm from it. “Ill go back later and see how far the edge has move to the line,” I think.

The creek culminates, for me, at a thick stand of black-soil rooted tea-trees (melaleuca blah-blahs). “They've been growing like that for millennia,” I think, noting the meter or so of black, peaty soil they're nestled in. I touch the thick, padded bark and the scent of the ocean is replaced by clean, earthy peat.

The sun is on my face and on the crown of my red hat now. I wander the paths through the melaleucas and then walk back to the shack via the road, forgetting all about checking on my line in the sand.

*
Later I return to the creek, leaving two sisters sleeping off the night before and Lise clipping, buffing and polishing her nails, getting as she explained 'closer to her corporate roots'. But I've left it too late to return to the creek, the line has been swept away in rushing eddies and the brandy creek and the Bass Straight are vying for rights to the beach. An uneasy truce sees the brandy creek exiting on the left and the ocean entering on the right. Further up-creek the sounds of the sea are softened by the absorbent bark and leaves of the melaleuca. The brandy creek is wide and uniformly brown. A small angled bird skims the surface of the shiny chocolate water, circling around me over and over again. I begin to turn with it and note the dark blue wings, mid-night back, soft grey belly and blushes of red on it's neck and chest. “What is it?” I wonder. “A Tasmanian swallow -obviously unladen- ?” I wish I had my mother, the bird fancier, with me.

I stand on one of the wooden bridges built to cross the brandy creek in one of its routes to the beach. The brandy creek is flowing backwards, pushed up river by the incoming tide. A very large man, jogging with his dog, thuds across the wooden slats of the bridge. “Hello,” we say, and I see something I interpret as agony in his face. The bridge vibrates strongly with each foot-fall but holds. Two girls, about nine or ten, are next. Drawn perhaps to my 43 year old stillness and welcoming smile they stop and join me looking at the brown creek flowing back towards its source. “Hello,” we all say to each other. I ask, “how are you?” They are both well. “Do you live here?” I ask then. “I'm here staying with my friend,” says the round faced girl with her hair in a slept on pony-tail. “I'm here with my three sisters. We're staying in a shack for the weekend.” They smile, perhaps relating to going away with sisters only, no grown-ups. The girls leave and I watch them go, smiling at their wandering freedom.

I walk back along the beach, where the wind has picked up. It roars in my ears and pulls tears from my eyes. If I close them I can imagine apart from my moving legs that I'm free-falling from a plane. I free-fall all the way back along the beach.

Just at the moment I've missed the walk way up to the shack Niki appears at the top of the bank, her hair covered in hair-smoothing curlers – obviously getting back to her corporate roots as well. “Hey, Kristi! Are you lost?” “Where's the path up?” I ask, and she shows me. “No, I wasn't lost, but I was about to be,” I thank her.

When I go inside I decide it's high time I did my teeth. In my suitcase the apparatus designed to groom a woman for the corporate world is lying abandoned: hair straightener, make-up, expensive face-cream, floss, toothpaste all untouched thus far... Fifteen minutes later I emerge: cleansed, smoothed and corporate. “Da-da! Notice any difference? Corporate Kristi is back!” I announce. We set to preparing for tonight's dinner. I make sushi, which turns out okay.

*
To be continued...

Daisy Doesn't Want To

2007-09-04T21:35:00.001+10:00

Daisy and her Mum chose their spot on the sand.
They spread out their towels, and rubbed sunscreen on each other’s backs.

“Come on Daisy, walk along the beach with me.”
“I don’t want to,” said Daisy. “I want to lie on the sand, and watch the clouds go by.”
Daisy lay back on her striped towel, and looked up at the clouds, slowly puffing past.

“I’m going to look for sea anemones in the rock pools. Will you come with me?”
“I don’t want to,” said Daisy, turning over. “I want to look at grains of sand on the beach.”
She sorted the grains of sand into different colours. Some of the sand looked like tiny, broken shells.

Daisy’s Mum plomped herself down on her towel. She fanned her face with her hat.
“Phew, I'm hot. How about a swim?”
“I don’t want to,” said Daisy. She lay on her back, with her own hat over her eyes.
“I want to listen to the sounds of the beach.”

Daisy listened.

She heard the rolling and sighing of waves, the thin cries of sea-birds, and the soft whispers of the breeze in her ears.
She heard the shrieks of her Mum as she splashed about in the cold water.

Daisy walked down to the edge of the ocean.
She made jelly patches in the wet sand.

When Mum called, “Daisy, come and eat your lunch!” Daisy said,
“I don’t want to. I want to build a city of sand castles.”

“Oh dear. You’ve got to eat,” said Daisy’s Mum.

Daisy built tall, sandy towers.
She dug moats and canals for the tide to fill later.

“Time for off!” called Daisy’s Mum, shaking out her towel.
Daisy folded her stripy towel to just the right size for her beach-bag.

But then … “Daisy! Listen!”

Daisy listened. She heard tinkling music drifting across the sand dunes.

“I'm going to get an ice-cream. I don’t suppose you want to …?” asked Mum.
“Yes, I do want to!” laughed Daisy.
“Well, I don’t believe it!” said Mum.
“Come on, let’s get two really big ice-creams.”

So they did.