Award-Winning Short Stories by Jennifer Kemarre Martiniello

This Portfolio presents Short Stories which have won awards, commendations or been shortlisted for major awards. All have been published in anthologies and journals in Australia and overseas, many of them multiple times.

Chosen


It’s only one. One branch screeching into the just-fallen night, its agony the wind.

“September shouldn’t be like that.” Decades of memory have gone home now, south-western Queensland, September, to soft days, soft breezes, and violets. Violets everywhere.

They’re the only flowers he plants, now. Dark floating beds of them spilling over the edges of pavement, footpath, lawn, wire. Soon that’s all there’ll be. Everything else will have disappeared under the incursions of his re-eternalised spring. Winter, summer, autumn, don’t exist any more. They’ve been rendered dumb.

The tapes speak the same, over and over - no memories except spring. Twelve to twenty-seven are the only years he lived. The rest… who knows who sheltered in that skin? From twenty-seven to seventy-eight, who spoke for him … acted? But then, that’s the crux of it.

The darkness is dense outside, impenetrable except by the wind and the one branch as we finish up this last session. An odd medley, the grating passion in the quavering voice, almost dissolving onto the tape, but still hovering in the room somehow, in me.

Outside the tape it’s autumn, winter close by, waiting. He won’t see it, the cancer will have taken him by then, like the memories. Creeping, invasive, hungry.

“I won’t be seeing you again, then.” He leans arthritically for the answer. His eyes are anything but. The gaze is cancerous.

“No, I suppose not. I’ll mail the transcript.”

“No need. You’ll do it proper. Just tell that pompous git that you’re my final authority. Understand?”

The branch screeches against the corrugated iron of the roof. I’m beginning to understand certainty in terms other than its mental manifestations - the branch, the cancer, the selective memory, the violets. They all have power, to speak, to eat. The pompous git is his nephew, and my editor. The old man knows about final authority, what it can do. It’s his way of cutting through the wire of the prison fence outside, just like the violets. Their softness grows right through it, that’s their strength. Words, even impassioned words, are soft actions with the potential to grow cancers.

He’ll leave a lot to inherit. A trust fund, some property, even a bequest to the Institute of Criminology, and three hundred thousand metres of words. A briefcase full.

A guard escorts me back along the wind-demoned walkway to the main entrance. Silent, glances restricted to two, neither direct. At the office the guards don’t say a word, either, look sideways at my briefcase. They never touch it, coming in or going out. I could smuggle in a sub-machine gun in sections for all they’d know. I get the impression its connection to him has made it contagious somehow. I feel like an untouchable.

They’ve had him out here on the prison farm for the last four years, age and illness a partial pardon from his life term in maximum security. Well cloistered, though, from the young lads in the main prison building on the trip between socio-conservative exile and salvation or pariahdom. They’re not in his class. On their part, they’re all too young to know what he’s in for. It happened long before their time, even before some of their parents were born. To them he’s just some loony old coot hovelled out there in the back blocks. Beyond that, they take no interest. I suspect it’s not so the other way round, especially with the Koori boys. There are silences on the tapes that pulsate with the unspoken. Sometimes the gaps between words can carve chasms. If you slipped into one you might never make it out again. Not the same, anyway.

Three high fences and half a paddock of open country separate the main compound and his, the walkway a suspended bridge across its sea of stubble. A sterile zone too wide to carry the contamination of even a glance. The guard who lets me out the main gate looks at me like a carrier.

It was spring when they dug up the bodies, three in one grave, two in another. Two more single graves the following spring. But not in his. Their deaths marked the quickening years of an early summer, a summer that never made it to old. Never made it onto the tapes, either. The guards don’t know that. They think I’m winding up screeds of blood and hate around the spools of the recorder session after session. Imagining some gory growth about to burgeon into print. But they’re wrong, although the earth was well-turned by spring, the seeds of the coming crop planted. Strange how one branch can grow its own stark tangent out from the trunk, split the symmetry of expected form, remain out-cast yet still be of the same stuff, from the same seed, feeding on the same sap - hang out there at the mercy of the wind, undying.

But that’s part of the paradox. How, out of the re-emergent kernel of spring, he chooses to speak with the voice of the husk. As a keeper of knowledge learned early, understood late, told almost in parable. At this end-time of his life, to me and beyond me, he has assumed the first and last role of old age, the story-teller. Somehow I have reverence for that, it fills an absence in my own life. He knows that, too. He’s an adept translator of the silence.

The uniforms on the bodies were still recognisable when they dug them up. Holey with due process, but recognisable. Their badges of final authority ultimate, dirt-streaked, rotting on the inside. But not the ochre and feathers found on them. Ochre belongs to the earth, is part of it, eternal as spirit. That phrase is on the tapes, over and over again, a repetition like a litany, religious almost. The autopsies showed the same repetitions. Shreds of uniform intermingled with fragments of sternum and vertebrae from the penetration and withdrawal of a flat, pointed object with barbed edges.

The rent-a-car’s heater is trying to leach the chill out of my bones in the thirty-five minutes from the prison to the motel. It touches skin, not much else. I’m still sitting in his outhouse of a cell, its concrete floor, block walls and tin roof the arbiters of temperature, cold enough to shake, feverish enough to sweat. Some critical mass has tipped my immune system over an abyss. I’ve worked damned hard to keep that immunity precision balanced between stability and dis-ease, worlds. I want sleep. The motel’s five-star rating does nothing. The phrase ‘country comfort’ is beginning to take on multiple meanings, fragmented, slippery.

There was a letter in the defence’s files from a woman who said she came from up near Charleville. Went on and on about proper obligation, law, keeping the country clean and quiet like the Ancestors made it, looking after what belongs to it, about those that are chosen walking the land with feather shoes, able to move like spirits, silent, leaving no traces. It never got tabled in court, though. I pulled the files, dust-ridden from the bowels of the archives, before I came. Research. The first intimation of certainties that impose power from other places - absences, mythologies - untouchable. The prosecution didn’t even have a case. Just circumstantial evidence and social ‘truths’ hobbled together with legal jargon. Wormholed officialese.

The pompous git is getting impatient. There’s three messages on my voicemail, three questions. The first is redundant, he knows where the hell I am. The second facetious, unsettling. My head knows it’s only a story for the weekend feature of a Sydney newspaper. But my gut knows I’m bound to its gaps like an investigative biographer. The third question is deadly.

It’s on the fifth tape, towards the end. Strangely, it’s the most poignant of all of them, despite the passion that carries it, inevitably, to its destination. Mid-spring, the mission outside Charleville. You’d hardly think there’d be anything soft to the days in a place like that, under Protectionism. But to him they’re soft with the family all together, being on country, despite the conditions. The earth itself is soft, a mother’s bosom, to those who know the feel of her skin.

His mother grew roses at the back door near the clothesline, at the front next to the verandah. And violets. Violets in broken pots, empty powdered milk tins, rusty buckets, on the verandah, the window sills, down the dirt path to the absent gate, everywhere.

“The smell of them, like heaven’s own breath. It’d fill your heart, set your spirit to singing. And the colour of them. Rich, like precious gems scattered in front of you when you walked out of a morning, the dew still on them, making them shine …”

But he hated the roses. They were perfumed like the soap the mission manager’s wife always wore, gave his sister to scrub with before she went up to the residence to do her house maid’s chores. He didn’t hate the smell because of the manager’s wife, but because her husband had a thing for it, too.

“But I never told that high-powered nephew of mine. Nor did his mother. She’s gone now, poor Ruthie.”

I can still hear his voice - gruff, a slight slur to take the edges off it, soften it up - but clear. God, it’s clear. Not my place to let secrets out of the grave the dead took with them. Where does that leave me?… you’re my final authority. Understand? No, not when he said it. But I’m beginning to, God help me. Nothing’s straight, flat. Everything curves like topography. Tape Three … Up on country, there’s those that get chosen …

He goes on about the Ancestors, the old people. Close-up history. There’s reverence under the passion, respect. That’s it. Respect. The other constant that resonates through the tapes, a respect for tradition like it’s life itself, a deep respect for everything living, and where it belongs …

Christ. I’ve left my wits somewhere. He’s a lifer - four graves, seven bodies, five cops, two welfare officers. My head aches, I must be coming down with something. I’d sleep, but the rickety iron cot bolted to the floor of his cell floats on the plush King-Komfort of the motel bed like a ghost. I sat on it for most of the sessions, only one chair at his wooden relic of a table. He insisted, said that bed’d had enough of his old bones. Then he laughed. That’s Dreamin’ country, that old bed. Mine’s not, not tonight, anyway. Maybe never. Shit!

Coffee everywhere. Bloody ‘phone.

“What!”

“Where the hell’ve you been? You think I’ve nothing better to do than chase you long distance! There’s a newspaper at this end, remember? I sent you out there for five days and you’ve been there two and a half bloody weeks. It’d better be worth it. Now, what did the old bastard have to say?”

God, my head hurts.

“About what?”

“What do you mean, about what? Everything. The whole sick story. As for the feature, I get the final edit. OK? Now, spill it.”

There’s an undertow I don’t recognise. Suddenly I feel like I’m standing over a boiling cauldron on a thin sheet of 2-ply and the glue’s beginning to melt. He’s one of the techno-generation that takes pride in being able to mention out-of-date satellites. The same way the old man might have talked about Hillmans or Humbers, except he’d have spoken with more reverence. The nephew’s crossed the great divide to respectability, the past relegated to some half-dreamed shadowland. But when you’ve lived in shadows, bright light can blind.

“How much did you know about it, him? Before, I mean.”

“Never knew he existed ‘til I was thirteen. Only then because I was sent down to the Post Office to post a parcel and it had his name and the address of a prison on it. Asked questions, didn’t get too many answers. You know how the old folks go vague on you when they don’t want to answer a question.”

“So how old were you when he was put away?”

“Three, four. Why? What’s on those tapes to do with me? If that old bastard has dragged any of the family into it …”

“No … Well, there’s a lot that’s ambiguous …” Christ, that sounds lame.

“I didn’t send you up there to get god-damned waffle! I want answers. Why did he do it?”

“He doesn’t say, exactly.” It’s true, he doesn’t, exactly. It’s kind of layered into the sub-terrain between words, tapes. Even then, I’m not really sure. It’s just a glimmer of something, like on Tape Nine - … that country’s crying out to get cleaned up properly. We’ve got to look after it, you know? Just like you look after your own. I’m caught. I can’t write any of it. Not yet.

“What the hell did he talk about - exactly?”

“He’s leaving a bequest to the Institute of Criminology. With conditions.”

“What? What kind of bequest? What conditions? Who the hell does the old bugger think he is?”

“Money. They have to use it to establish a mandatory course for trainees - ethical practices in cross-cultural interactions.”

Silence ripples out across the bed with the ‘phone cord, the ear at the other end floundering on the unfathomable. The absence of a voice can leave you in a precarious place, especially when you can’t tell which way the thoughts behind it are going to jump. …sometimes you’ve got to give people a bit of guidance, help them to see where they’re headed, especially when it’s no good place.

“He didn’t waste his time, you know. He studied by correspondence. Ethics, social anthropology, political science, philosophy. He’s got a lot of knowledge in his head.” But that’s not the knowledge on the tapes, although you can see the shapes of it weaving in and out, like shadows, all that other learning. Like he was trying to turn the other into himself, and out again. A weird kind of inversion, displacement and exorcism all in one. I’m grappling for the sense of it. It’s there, somewhere.

“Where did he get the money?”

“Won some lottery. Said all that money wasn’t much good to him, just one bloke, moving around from place to place shearing. So he bought a proper house for the family at Lismore to get them off the mission, or the reserve as it was by then. Got himself a four-wheel drive, and set the rest up in a trust fund with a legal firm to administer it. I get the impression he won it after the murders, but he doesn’t say. I guess it’s traceable enough.”

“Jesus Christ!”

The 2-ply just gave way, but not from under me. It’s on Tape Seven. Why didn’t I pick it?

“Get those tapes back here. Yesterday! … Oh, and two young blokes from Canberra were looking for you this afternoon. Might be on the way. Don’t be there.” The sudden termination is as ominous as the imperative.

I know why I didn’t notice. It was something else about that bed. We were mid-way through the seventh tape when I really saw what topped and tailed it, on the walls. Newspaper clippings. Photos of the demonstrations. One in particular from a few months back, protesters marching up the steps of the new Parliament House waving the Aboriginal flag. Right there in sharp focus were Aaron and Gene, the two who were in the office looking for me. Gave me start, seeing their faces on his wall. I masked it and went on taping. But he noticed. His reaction was swift, subtle, gone. It was satisfaction. Made my gut hit glacier scree.

About where the pompous git’s gut must be right now. It’s money that grows obligations for his generation. If he was looking for an inheritance he’s found one. Or rather, he’s always had it. Somehow I don’t think the old man’s story will make it into print, not for any Sunday spread, that’s for sure. Material things the old man always spelled out in meticulous detail on the tapes, an inborn trait rather than learned. His nieces and nephews have all done well, educated for success. None were ever stolen by the Welfare, either. Obligation is looking after your own. No shame-job in that.

* * *

I moved to Canberra last month. It’s a pretty place in spring, but there’s a chill to the nights, especially when it’s windy. Gave up the journo’s job, lost the scent for it. I’m studying Law at university.

The old man died the first week in July. The authorities released the body to be buried in his own country. I went up for the funeral, the nephews and nieces didn’t. There were so many people. I didn’t know that many would remember him. So much grief, so much respect. Aaron was there. I hadn’t expected to see anyone I knew. We’re cousins, not sure where the connection is, no-one ever told me. I couldn’t figure out why he went.

“Didn’t you come up for the same reason I did? He’s related … you know, Aboriginal way. Sort of like … grandfather. Be the same for you, too, I’d reckon. Isn’t that why you went to see him before he died?”

Some certainties don’t have words. Their power is the echoes they make in other words. Places. Silences. The pompous git keeps ringing to see if I’ve finished transcribing the tapes. I keep stalling. Aaron, Gene, a few others of the young men are helping me. I’ve decided they have first right to listen to them, to know. After all, to them he’s a hero, a warrior. There’s been a lot of protests lately, negotiations, court cases. I wish he could hear it all. Maybe he does. Better than people hear me sometimes. I’ve taken to wearing steel-capped boots these days because no-one ever hears me coming - like I’m walking on feathers.


©Jennifer Martiniello.

Published in Blak Times, Meanjin Literary Journal, February, 2006.
Winner Banjo Paterson Literary Award 2002, 2nd Place.
Finalist Ian St. James International Short Story Award (UK), 2000.

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The Attempt


The backroads were awash. Suspicion inching and sidling with the water up the fence posts from the creek. The weeds were drowning.

She couldn’t rescue them. Loose stones rolled like rapier marbles underfoot. But she tried anyway, hobbling on ribbons, the mud swirling and spitting back at the pelting rain all round her, the pretty new Christmas dress skun to a clinging rag on her skinny body. They were out there, she could almost hear them, mewling, crying through the gaps in the wind.

He said the wind had teeth. Big tombstones of teeth for ripping out all the trees and bushes, like the earth was its salad sandwich and when it got hungry it took a bite. He said the gaps in the wind were when it stopped chewing to swallow. That was last year. But this year he was still three years bigger than her, three years smarter. He knew more, that’s what he said, last year.

This year he said if they sneaked out of church while the adults were lining up the aisles to take communion they could go down to the creek before the sky broke. They could carry them down to old grandfather mulga on the top bank and climb up the twisted limbs, tie them to the high fork in the trunk where the black kite’s nest used to be. They’d be safe there, he said.

She staggered, then regained her precarious lean against the rapidly rising water-level. The fence posts were black and soggy with brooding, the water sashaying its heartless hip against hers, daring her to dance with it to the pounding beat of the sky. The third wire up of the fence plucked and spluttered, its grey shiny music gulping in the road’s throat. But she refused to turn back. The wind swallowed again, and she could feel their helplessness hanging in the dumb octaves of its space. She plunged into its gaping maw.

He said he didn’t know where she was. The adults were frantic. She’d been missing half an hour at least by the time they noticed. At first they thought she was hiding in the old shack at the bottom end of the home paddock, sulking over the scolding they got for sneaking out of church in the middle of the service. They began to panic when they realised she wasn’t at the shack, in the machinery shed, the out-house, in the tree-fort or under the verandah. He acted as if it was a complete mystery to him.

“Girls! Who can figure ‘em?” He told them all they did was stand on the church porch to watch the clouds close in, wait to see the first of the wet come down.

They’d run all the way back from the creek, the dry dust kicking up from their feet. They just made it before the sky opened up and the last hymn ended, she still shaking from the exertion of clambering up old grandfather mulga. She’d come close to falling, too, losing her grip on a high-up limb, almost dropping one of them. She’d carried two of them, her special ones, he only one, and the plastic bags with the rope slung over his shoulder. Tying up was boy’s business he told her, girls weren’t any good for that sort of thing. Now on the slope down to the creek the road surface swum on top of the water. Her foot slid sideways into one of the deep wheelruts, invisible now, and lethal. She grabbed at the fence wire and tore her hand on a barbed piece, spluttering as her mouth went under.

She was terrified. She didn’t know it would be like this. She’d heard the stories the adults told, of course. Her father and his, their mothers, sisters, nodding in horrified confirmation of floodwaters, drownings, disappearances, dramatic rescues. But for all their graphic detail they remained ‘outside-you stories’, the recollections of witnesses, second and third hand. None had ever been stories told from inside the person who drowned, or nearly drowned, or disappeared. She had no intimate wisdom to draw on. Her mind scrambled for something to remember, something to grasp, but the only thing solid and relatively unmoving around her was the pitifully narrow gauge wire sliding under her palms. She closed her eyes and gripped it fiercely as her feet were swept back and out from under her.

“That big fella water him real strong. Can take them big trees down if he want.” Their mothers’ Old Uncle told them stories about ‘that big fella water’, when it was good and peaceful, when it was angry because people didn’t treat it properly. Sometimes that big fella water would swallow up whole towns, cattle, dogs, sheep, sometimes people. Sometimes it’d throw them up into the arms of trees as it went past if it didn’t want them that time.

She prayed it didn’t want her this time. Or them. At least they had grandfather mulga to hold them, as long as it didn’t want him, too. She slid her hands by inches along the wire, trying to go forward towards the unrecognisable creek, trying to peer through the water to see if she could see the top of the old mulga still standing. But water spat on her face and eyelids from above, from below in retaliation, from either side. The world was water, with a thin, slippery strand of wire the only other thing in the world besides her. Even the wind had stopped eating, its mouth full of water.

Their fathers were pulling on oilskins and boots, amassing rescue equipment. They waited for others to arrive to help look for her, but few came, the rest were on sandbagging teams working to shore up the town, preempting the worst. Their mothers questioned him over and over, did he know where she might be … think, had she said anything to him, what was she talking to him about that morning, at church, after church … think! He said he hadn’t listened much to her silly prattle, maybe she went up the top paddock to see if the poddy calf was alright, maybe she’d walked over to Josephine’s house, maybe she’d run away, or gone to watch the old ladies setting up the patchwork quilt exhibition in the old schoolhouse … how would he know where she was?

The plastic bags were his idea. “If it’s going to rain hard,” he’d said, “the plastic bags will keep them dry. We’ll wrap the bags around them and then tie them up in the tree. That way if the creek floods they’ll be safe and the rain won’t drown them.”

“But how will they breathe inside all that plastic?” She was panicking now. What if they couldn’t get any air? People died when they couldn’t breathe, what if it was the same for them?

“Don’t be stupid. You’re so dumb, even for a girl! When are you ever going to learn anything?” His scorn stopped her voicing any more of her fears, but it hadn’t stopped the panic inside. What if they couldn’t breathe? What if they died? She would have murdered them, the most precious things in her whole world. But she’d helped him wrap them up in the bags, wreaths and layers of them, and clung to the fork in the tree while he trussed them against the trunk. Surreptitiously she’d torn breathing holes in the plastic with her fingers when he wasn’t looking. But what if it wasn’t enough?

The heavens opened wider and the downpour thundered at her, roaring its mockery at her helplessness. The terror made her numb. She could barely feel the wire still jerking and dragging under her hands. She wished she had some plastic for herself now. She thought she’d rather die by suffocating than by drowning. Her skin felt like it had turned to water, that it was stripping in streaks and streams off her, that she was disappearing into the writhing brown creature as if she were dissolving layer by layer. Then a fencepost gave way, dragged from its bed by the surging floodwaters, and she swept swerving and dipping into their demented dance.

He’d leant against the doorframe and watched her pacing her anxiety up and down the verandah while their mothers were in the kitchen preparing the Sunday roast. He said she just proved how dumb she was, acting stupid like that over them, they weren’t worth anything. What could she do about it, anyway? But even his contempt couldn’t quell the fear, the panic rising as the rains came down harder and heavier. The adults said they could tell it was going to be a bad one. Might even wash the banks of the creek away, take down the big trees. But they’d be OK here, up on the high ground of the homestead.

He said she was pathetic and didn’t have the guts for it. She was only a girl, after all, everybody’s little darling. And everyone knew little darlings were weak and useless because they were pampered, never had to grow any guts or sense for themselves ‘cause everybody did it for them. He dared her.

Old Uncle found her next morning, hung up by the wire on what was left of old grandfather mulga’s shattered trunk. From his dinghy he’d thought it no more than a tangled bundle of rags and wire heaved up by the water, until he saw the small, shell-pale hand limp against the black wood. He cursed that big fella water all the time he was straining, pulling, prising the wire away, tearing his hands to shreds on the barbs as he gradually freed his niece. In the boat he wrapped his coat around her battered little body and tried to bring her back, but what shallow breath remained in her limped ragged into the thin air and he was afraid it would die away before he had her to dry land and help. He beseeched the Ancestors for her life and cursed that big fella water with alternate strokes of the oars all the way to land, the tears streaming down his face. This was the child in whom, right from the moment of her birth, he’d seen all the light and promise of the first sun at the beginning of creation. He’d seen her destiny. Not like the boy. Old Uncle could tell bad blood when he saw it, too.

Five days later, when the floodwaters began to subside, she still lay between worlds, her skin as translucent as the drawn curtains of her room. Time came and went like debris, broken whispers that seeped through the cracked door, leaking through stories of the worst flood in the town’s recorded history. He hung around the edges of the doorway, in between the adults’ vigils like flotsam, unsure of his footing. Her inert survival unnerved him, the certainty of his existence cast loose from its moorings. In some inexplicable way he knew she was beyond him now, and would forever remain so. He dreaded her waking. She wasn’t even aware of his presence. Not even his voice featured in the dreams that tossed her on the restless chop of the pillow.

Late that evening someone lifted the quilt and tucked something warm and familiar in against her. She sighed and turned into them, the world at last complete and worth coming back to. The final moments she remembered before sleep drifted happily on Old Uncle’s voice.

“You shoulda seen them emergency fellas’ faces when they seen what was all wrapped up dry in that plastic an’ tied up strong to that old mulga log! They was scared it was kids bin tied up there to save them from that big fella water. Reckon that baby’s dolls was the driest things in all that big flood.”



©Jennifer A Martiniello.
Winner of the 1999 Grenfell Henry Lawson Literary Prize and Statuette.

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Pay-Back Alley


At last someone came. A slow inching on eggshells down the alley from the street. She heard the low rusted protest of a loose corrugated panel from the opposite end and sensed the eyes still peering through from the other side, watching her lying there motionless, belly-down in the dregs of last night’s rain. Another sound, the eggshell walker, a cripple hobbling on curiosity and fear. She could smell it in his sweat. Yes, definitely male, adolescent, light, ready to run at the first hint of danger. Two paces nearer, then silence. The hair on the back of her neck prickled.

The newcomer’s gaze raked over the slight form crumpled behind the dumpster, one arm under, the other awkward over her face. It took in the bag of shopping lying nearby, its contents half scattered, the flattened loaf of bread, the battered tomatoes at her elbow, the stain of them on her dress. Another step, then two more that edged out towards the other side of the alley. She sensed him stoop, heard the hollow scrape of metal on concrete as he picked up the piece of pipe that lay against the wall. Her stomach knotted. Fear beaded its sweat around her forehead like a crown of ice-cold thorns. In this neighbourhood intention was up for grabs. Rescuer, robber, rapist, there was no way of telling.

The reality of her situation pasted its terror onto another horror. She saw her mother collapsed like a rag doll with her shopping spilling all ‘round, her dress over her head, her blood mixing with the refuse of a slum alley. Her little sister’s body battered and bleeding behind the rubbish bins where the attackers had thrown her after they’d finished. Even her father’s drunken anguish before he took his own life. He’d chosen the drink instead of them that day. She still hated him. The anger was cold. It plunged her back into the alley, her senses rescued from an impending blackness. More steps. She fancied them lighter, stealthier than before. He was behind her now, still sizing things up, motives as yet unfixed.

She sensed a swift intake of breath, an intensifying of fear as his eyes took in the dark stain matting the tangle of her hair, recognised its likeness on the end of the steel pipe in his hand. It dropped clanging to the ground. A startled movement from behind the fence at the end of the alley sent his footsteps scattering back towards the mouth of the alley. Closer to him another sound, different. From under her arm she glimpsed a pair of dirty sneakers and ragged jeans slide back into shadows behind a pile of milk crates. The hard scrunch of steel-capped boots stopped just inside the alley.

“Brother? Ya there?”

“Yeah, bro.” The sneakers detached themselves from the shadows and sidled up to the boots.

“Whatcha got ‘ere, brother?” The boots moved a few paces into the alley, no eggshells underfoot this time. The voice was gruff, slurred, like drunken tyres skidding on gravel. Breath and pulse leapt. It was the voice she needed to hear.

“Dunno, bro. I … I heard ‘er scream. Some fella done ‘er in, I reckon.” The voice was nervous, edging towards panic. “One a them uptown bitches, looks like, too good for the rest’v us. Better get out’v ‘ere before the cops show up. C’mon, bro.” The sneakers were already two side-steps away, geared for take-off.

The boots didn’t move. She could feel the cold seeping up from the ground into her, the chill sweat under her hair, the breath dragging in her lungs. She needed that voice to come closer, lift back the hair from her face, see her. She pleaded for consciousness not to abandon her, not now. It was so close.

“’Ain’t no cops up this end, brother. All gawn down the camp, lookin’ for Uncle. ‘Im an’ them fellas from up the river busted up the pub real good after the game this arvo. Auntie’s mad as hell.” The boots turned sideways towards the sneakers, then back again.

“C’mon, brother, let’s see what we got ‘ere.” The rounded toes of his boots swelled into two malevolent black eyes glaring into the narrow space between her arm and the ground. He squatted down close to her, the alcohol on his breath stupefying as he leaned forward to pull back her hair.

“Don’t, bro, don’t. We gotta get out’v ‘ere.” The hair dropped as the man’s shoulder was dragged back in the other’s frightened grip. A boot jarred against her elbow as its owner turned, angry. Under the scuffle and shove close to her she sensed rather than heard the muffled scrape of corrugated iron further down the alley. There was half a curse followed by a whining reproach, then the boots took one stride back to her side and she felt a rough hand grab her shoulder to turn her over.

“Jesus Chri … s …”

The profanity slumped back into his throat as his heavy form fell forward onto her, his face frozen into a weird melodrama mask of shock. The weight almost knocked the breath from her. The half-cry from his companion ended in a flurry of bare feet rushing up the alley like a demented wind and the soft-hard sound of a piece of four-by-two burying itself in a skull. It was followed by two more blows in quick succession, and the dirty sneakers and jeans were joined by a blood-spattered Guns ‘n Roses T-shirt in a limp huddle on the ground.

“C’arn, sis. Get up. Quick!” Adrenhalin-bright eyes under dreadlocks darted between her and the mouth of the alley, bare feet dancing nervously, the bloodied length of timber still in his hand.

“Help get the bastard off me!” The girl struggled to free herself of the weight and rising panic both suffocating her. The boy hurled the chunk of wood back into the shadows and hauled with maniacal strength at the dead man’s collar and leather vest. His fingers shrank from touching the body itself. Eventually he grabbed at the belt and dragged it back as his sister scrambled out from under, trembling violently.

He was already at the corrugated iron fence when he realised she wasn’t with him. Turning he saw her, still shaking visibly but with a look of loathing and triumph on her face, standing over the man whose body looked grotesquely comical with its big steel-capped boots pointing up towards heaven. Her victim hadn’t even seen the death flash in her hand as he dragged her face-up. But he felt its eight inches of cold Rambo steel all the way to the heart. The girl paused long enough for the moment to carve itself sweetly into memory, then she turned and ran for the fence after her brother.


©Jennifer A Martiniello.
Finalist ANUTECH Literary Prize, 1998.

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My Daughters’ Children


I watched my children grow in your shadow. Shadows in shadows. Silent. Invisible. Only my daughter’s mothers’ hearts heard them crying into the dark night. Desperate sounds mewling into places where no light shone. You built walls around them to shut out the sky. They couldn’t wake to the sight of their ancestors dreaming in the sky. You put hard shoes on their feet so they couldn’t feel the arms of their mothers and their mothers’ mothers’ mother reaching out to hold them. I watched my children shrivel without their life to make them strong.

Your legacy was a bitter road to travel. Toughen them up, you said, make them earn their place. My children have never needed to earn their place. They are born to it, of it. Their place is their life, heart, breath and being. They no more have to earn these things than do the sky, rivers, trees and oceans. Their place is theirs by the simple right of being, and in fulfilling that being they nourish and are fed, give life and are given life, in kinship with all that is part of that being. This is the highest truth of belonging to one’s place.

You see, you forgot yours. Now you are lost and want everyone else to be lost with you so you don’t feel alone. But you carry your aloneness and separateness in your heart, so when you think with your heart you only see strangeness and difference. When my children think with their hearts they see their family and kinship to all that is. Even you. That’s why my children’s mothers were so kind to you. It made their hearts sad to see you so much like a lost child who doesn’t know the stories of belonging.

You took my children away so they wouldn’t know their stories of belonging, too. You tried to make them like you. Now my children’s mothers’ hearts are sad because there are so many lost children looking for where they belong. It is sad to see people who have lost their place. They stay sad, too. All the hard roads and toughening up and earning your place in the world can’t make you belong because your place isn’t something you can go out and get. This, too, is truth.

In the beginning of the world when you were like us you belonged to your places too. But you began to forget when you started to think you were more important than your place. You forgot that your place is all that is life. That’s when you started to get blind and couldn’t see the all, only parts of it. And then you thought that some parts were more or better than other parts and everything got out of balance in your perceptions of the world.

My children’s perceptions of the world were not out of balance. All they perceive is all that is, and all they need is provided in their kinship to all they perceive. Not your way. Our way makes my daughters’ children happy because all they need is given completely and freely and grows forever. Your way gives in bits and pieces, always promising more, always taking away, always asking us to pay more. Your way teaches children to fight each other for what they want, not to enjoy together everything they share and are a part of. And what they are a part of is inexhaustible and unceasing.

Your way puts limits on everything, divides and fragments, measures out quantities. You think what is infinite can only be known in finite bits. Our children know that what is infinite can be Dreamed, and what can be Dreamed can be known and held by the heart and cannot be divided or measured.

My children’s mothers and their mothers’ mothers sigh in your shadows. We sigh for the children wandering in your shadows, looking for their way home. Their hearts tell them they are far from home, while you tell them they only have the homes you made for them. But these places are cold streets and juvenile detention centres, half-way houses to nowhere and prisons with bars between Dreaming and death. My children are living the nightmares you made for them. They are dying.

But now my daughters’ mothers’ hearts are singing. Singing the children home to their first nations. Our voices will sing the fire to burn away your dark dead shadows. My daughters’ mothers’ voices will sing the land my body to rise again from under your feet so the children can see their countries shining in the light. Our voices will sing the wind to carry the sounds and fragrant smells of their places to them. We will sing our strong woman’s spirit and the sounds of our voices will rise like great birds to guide our children home, to their places where they will never die.



©Jennifer Martiniello.
Runner-up, Irish Australian Commemorative Famine Literary Award, 1998.

 

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