Short Stories by Jennifer Kemarre Martiniello which have been previously published in anthologies and journals.
Ordinary Days Are Colours
The kid’s swinging on the monkey bars. They’re blue. Little rolls of the sky dropped down and hung between the green heads of trees leaning together, watching, whispering, like mothers when they drop their kids off at school in the mornings…
Blue. You’d expect the monkey callouses on the kid’s hands to be blue, too. Little blue hard-skin pools for playing in, picking at, peeling off when ears close like roll-a-doors and she goes away into some dark, cool interior where privacy is garaged. Or emanating blue, like that aura of quick blue laughter that sparks up and out and splashes all over you when she’s happy. You’d expect the blue to be contagious like the laughter, washing up her arms like finger paint, transferring itself to your palm from hers when she wings down to the tanbark and catches you on the swing-past on the way to the slippery dip.
You’d look at your hands, suddenly full, suddenly empty, and expect them to be blue. But they’re not. They’re cast in the tough, weatherbeaten pigments of trust. The kid painted them that colour, indelibly, and the generation before her. Kids do that to parents, grandparents, it’s part of the deal. They splash into your life like rainbows on a flood of amniotic fluid and in return you accept every colour they choose to look at you through. You become what they make you, it’s the nature of things.
“Grandma.”
“Yes, babe?” She’s six, and glories in every effervescent moment of it.
“Can we go over there, on the fort?”
The kid’s small hand connects urgently with yours and yanks you ‘round. The other points with hopeful precision. They’re solid, those reefers of small tree-trunks bolted together for the squared-off climb for the clouds. Each one a horizontal summit to be attained in its own right. Last week she made it to the top for the first time. Everest wasn’t conquered with greater triumph. It’s strong, brown and green, reformed from the earth, still belonging to it. You can trust it.
“I s’pose.”
The response bounces on the grass and rolls after her. The fort’s another ball game. It takes muscle and concentration, small calves and thighs willing to be stretched on a giant’s step ladder, a bent for bean-stalking the sky. The kid’s three logs up and climbing before you catch up to your answer.
“Be careful. Don’t take any risks up there.” Might as well tell a fledgling not to test its wings.
There’s that blue again. A transmigration from the monkey bars. The smile is beatific. Maybe blue just belongs mid-air, a substitute for wings. But no aimlessly flitting butterfly, this one. She’s all dragonfly, shimmering and dazzling, a winged elemental cruising on primordial prescience. Her mother’s like that, too. Except she’s the darker intense ultramarine of deep flowing water, fathomless under that bright rippling surface that catches sunlight.
Dragonflies are fascinating creatures. The first part of their lives are spent on water. The larvae are called nymphs. In the first stages of growth, the nymph clings to the water, casting its skin up to fifteen times during the maturation period. In the later stages, when it reaches a particular threshold of development, it climbs out of the water to hatch, but stays clinging to the nymphal skin until its wings expand and dry ready for flight. Dragonflies are endowed with two sets of wings for speed, stability and manoeuvrability, the Zygoptera having the most delicate and therefore called damselflies. Anisoptera are the supreme exponents of aerial agility. Anisozygoptera posses characteristics from both.
“Grandma …” She pirouettes to a graceful skidding landing beside you. Loose bits of grass and clover go flying up, batting unprepared insects into dizzy spirals. Her hair is as tumbled as the curling leaf patterns of shade under the tree where you sit.
“Grandma, when me and Mummy go to the coast with Toni and Tiahn, I have to be very careful of some things, don’t I?”
“Mm.” You watch focus pinpoint to the intensity of a laser. Concentration is its own kind of blue when it’s electric with serious thinking.
“I have to be careful of jelly-fish, and blue-bottles, and not walk on the rocks without shoes in case I step on something sharp, don’t I?”
“Yes. But you have to remember to have fun, too. I bet you’ll get to build the best sand castles and decorate them with shells. And you’ll be able to feed the seagulls, and go swimming.”
“Mm … Great Gran says I have to be careful of breaker waves. They nearly knocked her over twice, she said.” Laser beams are very straight.
“Well, yes, you should be careful of beaker waves, too.”
“Mm, I think I’ll just paddle, then. Provided there aren’t any jelly-fish or blue-bottles, or seaweed. I don’t like seaweed ‘cos it grabs you under the water. And provided there are poles to go between and lifeguards. Mummy says there’ll probably be lifeguards.”
“Yes, I expect there will. It’ll be school holidays.” You’d not really notice how the blueness and intensity of a laser beam increase in direct proportion to each other if you weren’t paying close attention.
“Grandma, what’s a breaker wave?” Ah, illumination. Objective identified.
“A breaker wave is one that’s a bit bigger than the others and breaks in closer to shore. When it washes back it sucks at your feet and ankles more than the littler waves do.”
“Oh. Can it pull you over?”
“Sometimes. But you can see them coming and run back up the beach where they can’t get you.”
“Why didn’t Great Gran do that?” Grown-ups are infallible, you can tell.
“Because Great Gran is getting too old to run very fast, so she just sat down in the shallow bit and let them wash over her.”
“But I couldn’t do that, could I, because I’m not as heavy as Great Gran. They could just come and knock me over and wash me out to sea, couldn’t they?”
“I don’t think that would happen, really, you can run faster. Besides, Mummy will be there with you.” You wouldn’t expect trains running on laser tracks would be so hard to derail.
“Well, I’ll probably only paddle when Mummy’s with me.”
The kid loves going to the coast, hankers after it, hovers on anticipation for summer. But air is a lighter blue than ocean, flight faster. Dragonflies are fresh-water creatures. Perhaps the sea is too big, too salty and immense and unknowable. Oceans demand respect and caution and decisions, just like adults. You have to know where you are with them, your capabilities and theirs. Having objectives isn’t enough, you have to know the consequences of reaching them, and then know with absolute certainty you can make the right decisions. That’s wisdom.
“Grandma …”
“Yes, babe.”
“Can I go on the Flying Fox?”
“It’s a bit high, don’t you think?” It’s a shiny, silvery-grey concoction of cables and slings and shadows suspended between the fort, two-thirds of the way up, and the awkward adolescent perpendiculars and tilted diagonals of a half-hearted pyramid lurched up under the trees near the fence. You’d expect it’s flight pattern to be just as awkward, slow and heavy like the feeling you get under that light-closed humid atmosphere that weighs all violet and black on your head and neck and shoulders before rain. But it’s not, it’s surprisingly smooth despite adult expectations. It’s built for older kids.
“But we went on it yesterday in PE. Mr McLeod held our legs and ran with them when we pushed off. You could do that.”
“Mm. I s’pose I could. But I’m not as tall as Mr McLeod.”
“No. But you could try.” Reluctance is one of those viscous mud-pool things dragonflies don’t know about. It’s too heavy for pearly gossamer wings. Too slow for aerial agility. The nymph’s four logs up and sparking that blue again. Even mud puddles dry up and crumble to dust sometime.
Determination is a sort of steel blue, with the metallic sheen of river gravel mixed in. The same sort of colour your chin becomes along the jaw-bone when it’s connected enough times with a pair of small-size bare heels. Contact with dragonflies is known to be metamorphic.
Dragonflies have long captured human interest and imagination. They have been written into legend, myth and fairy-stories, often given the magical power to transmute earth-bound human characteristics and environments. Transmutation is a permanent condition. Along with the condition comes the unnerving symptom of psychological shape-shifting. In lay terms this means you will never see the world the same again. Nymphs start practising early, almost as soon as they are born. By the time they clamber out of the parental placenta of water they are adepts, just like mystics, and have fully initiated the preceding generations.
“Grandma …” The sling of the Flying Fox shivers, bereft, as the kid zooms in on the grass.
“Mm?” Funny how you can see laser beams circling the sky in bright daylight. Almost as if cloudless azure still contains enough water droplets to be reflective.
“When Mummy was a little girl, you used to go to the coast lots, didn’t you?”
“Yes, most summers. Sometimes four or five times a summer, when we had a house there.”
“And you used to go swimming lots, too, didn’t you?”
“Mm.”
“Did Mummy ever nearly drown?” Lasers are like bees, they stop circling when they’ve located home and established the direction of flight.
“Once, almost. She was swimming in the inlet where the river goes into the sea, in the shallow bit between the sandbanks. But when she went to stand up there was a big hole there and her feet couldn’t touch the bottom.”
Sometimes questions are like swimming in waterholes. You can see the reeds growing ‘round the edges but you’re not sure exactly where the solid ground starts. The nymph’s great-granddad knew all about that, and bees. If you’ve got a hankering for wild honey and you just happen to be down by the waterhole and see a bee, you watch what it does. If it lifts off the water and heads straight you’re in luck, the hive will be close at hand. If the bee circles several times before choosing its direction, then don’t bother, the hive is too far away, unless you’re desperate and starving. Dragonflies are not known for being either, they’re too primordial, too prescient. Fortunately, grandmas represent fairly direct flight paths to desired ends.
“Did her head go under?” Her expression is netted in the murky grey-green mesh of concern.
“Once or twice. And every time she came up she splashed and yelled and I jumped in with my clothes on and pulled her out. But she went back in next day, and every day after that.” Prescience needs to be primed, instinct and intuition honed with knowledge.
“Were there any breaker waves?”
“No.” People said there were sharks in the inlet that year, but we never saw any. But that’s the sort of memory you walk carefully with and keep silenced in your socks.
“Oh.”
The effort to keep sharpening that fine edge between caution and reassurance fluctuates between a healthy skin colour, sticky watery yellow and red-raw, like blisters on your heel on a long hike in the hills. Agony is minimised by fore-knowledge of the terrain and being properly equipped. The babe’s query comes from an intermediate distance, somewhere between personal preservation, curiosity and the necessary preliminaries of committing the lie of the land to memory. Her great-granddad used to say that getting knowledge and getting wild honey are pretty much the same, you can get stung if you’re not careful. You have to know the right way of going about things. That’s wisdom, too.
A bee planes between the clover, by-passing the tight new buds, still pink, slowing to a hover of intent on the mature, creamy-white flowers. It skirts the babe’s encumbent form, curled chin on hands in the grass, and heads for untapped territory. Deep thinking comes in a variety of shades - pale misty mauve for reflecting, hazy gold moving to clarity for amassing things that belong together, discovering their relationships, purple for insight - without the ponderous momentum of physicality. You’d almost expect her to start rising, an iridescent bubble on the day’s heat. You could almost feel something magical about to happen, to burst bright and buoyant all over you, lift you breathless for the tree-tops.
But it doesn’t. The moment is gathered up in a single breath and launched across the grass in the kid’s sudden spring and sprint for the water-bubbler. There’s barely an indent in the grass where she was seconds ago. Dragonflies are like that, darting swift. And light. You’d hardly feel one settle in your hand.
“Come on, babe. Time to go home.” The closing day is turning mushroom pink under humid, fluffy clouds.
“Do we have to? I just need to go on the monkey bars one more time. I can do acrobatics, did you know?” She cartwheels up the rise. Room for three and a handstand between the bubbler and the monkey bars.
“Grandma, look! Can you see?” You can see blue. Blue rolls of sky flickering like dragon fire under the deft grip of hands, knees, ankles.
“I can see, babe.”
“Grandma?” The word spirals, air-borne, and straightens out for the ground.
“Yes, babe?”
“Will Mummy be finished work soon?”
“Very soon, and we haven’t had dinner yet.”
“Mm. Alright. But I want to help you cook.” The landing is as natural, as heart-stopping, as that word winging gossamer through the air between you.
You walk together along the path, under the shade of guardian trees towards the gate. Watch your feet and hers, side by side, not quite pace for pace. Yours longer, slower, used to leaving an imprint on the earth. Hers lighter, quicker, a dancing medley of rhythms inscribed more on air than earth. They harmonise, her rhythm and yours, like heartbeats used to sharing the same space. Walking home is interleaved with laughter, reminiscence, a fleeting end-of-day regret as inevitable as seconds, months, years pacing each other’s before and after.
Not that there’ll never be breaker waves. It’s not the nature of things. Oceans will always have their reefs and tides. Calm waters their undercurrents, rips that take you places you never dreamed of going, break intentions and directions as easily as grips on certainty. Even fresh-water streams have their ultimate rivers, rapids, waterfalls. And waterholes, as the nymph’s great-granddad used to say, have their reeds for whistling the wind, and you never can tell what key the tune will be in. And there’ll be one breezy day when adolescence will break over her like a king-tide and wash the child away, and the bright quick-silver of now will change to other colours.
The shadows are long on the ground as you cross the road for home. The kid bounces through the door and wraps herself around her huge golden dog in welcome. The dog wears her like favourite shawl, gently rearranging her clinging folds with happy-to-see-you yelps and licks. It’s an accustomed ritual, an everyday thing, always new, always the same, like the ebb and flow on an often-walked beach.
But then, todays’s just one of those every days. After dinner her mother will come to pick her up, and she’ll gather up her toys and kiss you goodbye, wave and blow kisses and send hugs through the car window as they drive off. And the day will revert to what it always was, an ordinary day, suddenly full, suddenly empty.
©Jennifer Martiniello.
Published in Australian Spirit, Beasley, M ed. 2001.
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The Silence
(Tribute to Hyllus Maris and Jimmy Chi)
I’ve been here a long time now . . . long time. But I don’t know this place. I was born here, but it didn’t look like this back then. I don’t remember how it was. I can’t see, can’t hear, can’t feel. It’s like being stuffed in a box with cotton wool inside. It’s soft - soft and white and suffocating. I choke on it sometimes. I want to get out but some big fella is sitting on top and the lid won’t lift off. That fella says there’s nothing different in here, just all white stuff, he reckons. But it isn’t. If it’s all white in here, where’s my skin? Sometimes I can’t feel my skin. There’s this white cotton padding around me instead. They wrapped me up in it when I was born. Around my head, my ears, my eyes, like some fella’s hand tight across my mouth, gagging me. This fella says I can’t look at my skin, can’t listen to it. This fella took away its voice.
There’s other voices, though. They whisper all the time. Always whispering, coaxing, demanding, jostling. Shoving each other around in my head like they’ve got a right to be there. It’s alright if I stay inside with them. Sometimes they sing me stories, one after another, and I feel warm as if I was sitting around a fire with them and we’re all part of a spiral of light that’ll never go out. I feel good then, and that big fella can’t touch me there.
But if I try and get out of the box it’s like being lost in a thick white mist that wheels around my head like some great sea bird. When it spreads its wings it covers all the land and shuts out the sky so I can’t see what’s really there. No sun, just white shadows everywhere trying to swallow me, trying to block out my shape from the landscape. I can’t move, can’t think, can’t breathe. Those white shadows just pour down on me like acid rain. It leaches into me, seeps into my head, burns my skin.
But that’s alright, according to this big fella sitting over my head. He reckons it’s for my own good, and those other voices aren’t real. Just imagination. He points at the walls inside the box. See? No place here for these dark voices to speak from, no cracks for ghosts to hide in. The walls have all been sealed up with white putty and painted over with layers of white wash.
This fella says I have to get rid of the voices, not listen to them, they’ve got no place in this white shadow land. But if this fella’s speaking the truth, then I’ve got no place here, either, because they’re inside me, part of me. They’re the same colour as this skin I’m crouching in. And that acid rain might bleach my skin, but it can’t bleach the voices.
That’s what that fella forgot, sitting up there all sure of himself with his head in the clouds. Blackfella voices stay black. And black words shatter white silence as surely as black words annihilate the whiteness of a page. He can sit there, but I’ll keep my voices and their stories and stay in my skin. And that’s something else that fella forgot. He might be on top, but he’s still outside. He’ll never get inside this skin because he’s too busy trying to keep his balance up there.
Funny thing, though, he can hear those voices too. All rumbling and growling like the sound of a big earthquake. But he doesn’t know they’re mine. He thinks I’m too well muffled up in his white box, too small and insignificant to have such big voices inside me. Voices strong enough to shake up the ground and tip his world upside down. So he just sits up there, all complacent and self-righteous, and wonders why the ground heaves.
©Jennifer A Martiniello.
Published in Writing Us Mob: New Indigenous Voices (1999).
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Faces in the Rain
The seat on the ferry is treacherous with salt-slick. It grips, abrades trousers, then slides away from under you, leaves you to meet the swell halfway on a cant. As the bow hauls ‘round for the jetty you can see the road rise up like an asphalt tide over the hill. It’s wet, too, sleek under light rain.
It beads lightly on your clothes at first, then gets the measure of fibre, weave, density. Begins the slow invasion, just like the faces. By the time you reach the crest of Hill Street it will have made a mockery of your turned-up collar, gone down dancing in runnels – neck, shoulderbone, breastbone, heart.
It always puddles in the heart. Drenched memory, dry years, rain. The thunder of a moment, an event, can split the sky, but it’s the rain that always finds the fissures. Trickles down to split bedrock. Sometimes you play at jumping cracks like you were six again. Most times you still end up the wrong side of sixty, third floor pensioner flat, basement blues. No bargain. The curse is that you look forty, think thirty-five, want twenty-six.
She’s a flirt, too, damn her. Worse, she’s got one of their faces. Amy’s. Only ever see her on rainy days, pert under a red flowery umbrella. Just like you used to see Amy on rainy days waiting outside the brownstone gate of the university, the unattainable ‘older’ woman for three and a half years forty-odd years ago. She had her eye on her English Lit. professor then. After him some philosophy tutor, then the captain of the rowing team, after that a gymnast, then… But theirs were the faces you didn’t know, never saw. Only hers, on rainy days on the tram when you clipped her ticket and she smiled at you and stole your heart. This one smiles at you, too. Moves over and makes room for you on the seat at the ferry terminus on wet Fridays. Some Fridays you go across just because it’s raining.
Like it’s raining now. Except it’s Thursday, and you’re coming back instead of going over. Your plastic shopping bags from Coles look anorexic beside the fat woman’s. Hers are obscene, stretched and bulging like the front of her dress between the buttons, and the fat, pudgy fingers always patting at her hair. You hate fingers like that, the sort that pretend delicacy in the way they touch and handle things but are always sweaty and anxious with the desire hidden in them. Heinrich had hands like that, your mother’s third boyfriend, but the fat woman doesn’t have his face. He didn’t have a face, either, after the second Christmas, and your mother wailed at the wickedness of the world and heartlessness of fate for months after the funeral.
The last time you saw Amy was at a funeral, on a Thursday, five months and six days after the last time you clipped her tram ticket. But it wasn’t raining, an overcast sky stifled the afternoon with humidity. She fainted at the graveside, pregnant, with a bruise on her cheek, dressed in black. The corpse’s brothers dragged her back onto her knees, hauled her up bodily by the armpits, their faces sullen with anger. Grid-ironed between them she accepted the meagre condolences, the one or two uni friends still around, a couple of neighbours, yours, without recognition. Tremulous thanks issued vacuously from somewhere behind her glazed eyes. After the funeral they took her home to her shabby little flat. When they left she turned his picture face-down on the dresser and closed the curtains.
The ferry captain has a face like his – a split-second profile glimpsed through a fogged-up window just before it happens. The bump of the hull against the pier, the slam of a truck cabin into a light pole seconds after the brakes fail. You wouldn’t know the captain face-on, in daylight, without his cap. Or walking down the street with his wife on his arm. Wouldn’t know if he even has one, or kids, a house, a car for dry land days. The totality of the life behind the face is reduced to the recurring glimpse of a ghost on a rocking deck. You wouldn’t have known the ghost full-frontal, either. Sometimes he’s not there at all. He has holidays, days off. Then it’s a stranger’s profile in the fog of the window and the lurch of the deck gets you panicking that you’ve let something slip. Something’s got away, out of control. You hope tomorrow’s not one of those days because it’ll be Friday, and raining, and there’ll be a red flowery umbrella at the terminus.
The fat woman’s husband is waiting on the pier with a black umbrella and a Pekinese on a leash. The dog is grunting its displeasure at the rain, at the feet dashing past it to get out of the drizzle. It shivers and yaps next to his leg. The fat woman berates him for bringing her poor little darling out in such weather as she dumps her obese burdens at his feet and seizes the umbrella. His forehead wrinkles mournfully into its fifty-plus years. He has Harry’s face. You can’t help but notice – the same beleaguered furrows, the same drooping salt-and-pepper moustache, patchy at one end, the same sort of wimply chin that could almost cry but probably never does. Harry never did, either. Not when they let him go from the trams after thirty years, not when they took his pension away after the accident inquiry, not when his wife left and the bank foreclosed.
Anyone could tell it was all a set-up. The authorities wanted a scapegoat and Harry had that sort of look about him. The sort that never made much fuss, the sort that never burdened anyone with his worries. Who didn’t know his rights, or even that he had any. The look of a loser. But Harry was the sort of bloke who was always nice to you. Never made no mind that no-one else ever talked to you, Harry would. Harry would sit down and talk about his garden while he shared his lunch with you. He’d have you over on weekends to play Euchre, teach you basic mechanics while he worked on his old Hillman, always had time for a drink with you after work or a yarn when you were down.
Harry could pick people, too. Knew all about them. He knew which missus on the tram had a Wednesday gambling habit, which one had secrets, which of them’d be nice to your face but gossip about you behind your back. He could tell which pin-stripe business suit was having it off with his secretary on Tuesday afternoons, which briefcase belonged to an accountant and which to the shady sales rep with a drinking problem. He knew who was safe and who to watch out for. People, he’d say, don’t especially like each other much. They’d just as soon see you get run over as smile at you. But then, lad, you’d know all about that, I’d reckon. Harry was never wrong.
You’ve never talked with the fat woman’s husband. Been seeing him here at the ferry terminus on rainy Thursday afternoons for six years, now. Never a ‘hello’, never a nod. Nothing. Except Harry’s face. You wonder, looking at him with the rain dripping off the end of his nose, if he ever thinks about suicide. If he’d ever have the guts for it if he did. Harry didn’t, in the end. In the end he just sat in a battered old rocking chair in his room down at the shelter and talked about what friends ought to do for other friends if they were the true blue sort. Especially if the friends in need were truly miserable. Misery, he’d say, gets people in one of two ways. There’s them that’s unhappy miserable, and them that’s just plain miserable sods. One’s a victim, second one’s a perpetrator that makes everyone else miserable. Either way, misery makes martyrs of otherwise decent folks. Reckon you’d know all about that second sort, wouldn’t you, lad? Harry, you remember, was a veritable font of wisdom.
Without Harry you wouldn’t have recognised Amy’s martyrdom for what it was. You were Harry’s protegé, no doubt about that. He was better than any professor at university, he gave you courage and conviction as well as imparted real knowledge about the way things are. You watch the fat woman Harry her husband on up the hill, sounding as shrill as the still complaining Pekinese. They live in Pomfrey’s Lane, a little narrow kickback off Hill Street designed for the old horse and cart days. Not meant for cars, not that they have one. You know which house. Terrace-style, with a row of iron pokers for a fence and a postage-stamp lawn in the front. Smart, though, with its glossy weather-bond hide looking just like the fat woman’s shoes. You wonder if the house creaks with her weight inside it, too. If he creaks under her, splitting at some invisible seam, his stitched-together sanity fraying, fraying…breaking. Like Harry’s.
There’s only one real cure for misery, Harry’d say, and that’s to end it, same way you’d eliminate a deadly virus that doesn’t respond to drugs. Like foot and mouth disease or fruit-fly. With the second sort, the perpetrator, everyone gets cured then. With the first one, though, it’s a last resort, a kindness to them that’s too far gone to be helped. Like you’d put down the dog that’s been your best mate for years so as to stop his suffering… Sometimes animals got more rights to dignity than humans.
The last time you saw Harry’s face was the day after Amy’s last tram ride. You knew somehow it’d be the last because she didn’t smile at you when you clipped her ticket, didn’t even look up. She was carrying an umbrella. It was grey, the hand clutching it pale. Just like Harry’s on that last afternoon, so still and cold on the neat turn-down of sheet on the bed. You remember it was chill that day in Harry’s draughty little box of a room. He told you not to take your gloves off. Your hands fumbled and slid on things as you made him that last cup of tea, cleared away the mess, swept up the spilt grains of white powder from the bench and slipped the empty gelatin husks into your pocket. He’d been ailing for a long time. You remember how his face closed quietly on the world. Just as, later, Amy’s curtains closed on a face that wasn’t Amy’s any more, just someone else’s you didn’t know who had an existence other than on rainy days…
You stumble over a root thrust up by the footpath, go down cursing on one knee to the wet ground. It’s uncared for face is crazed with erratic crevices, muddy patches leaching up through the cracks. It reminds you of that pavement the other side of the little park, the one across from Amy’s ground floor flat. How the rain came down later that afternoon in flat, heavy blows. Now it has the light touch of a trickster, playing mock and run with you like a sly conspirator. The fat woman and her husband have disappeared from sight, already out of Hill Street and nearly home. You get up and pick up your bags of shopping again. Begin the trudge uphill. You always walk a distance behind, never hurry, even when it’s raining and you don’t have an umbrella. And you need it to keep raining because tomorrow’s Friday.
You don’t trust umbrellas. Umbrellas give away secrets. Harry never carried an umbrella. The red flowery one she carries on wet Fridays is new this autumn. Last year she had an indeterminate pastel one. For a while it bumped brims with a garish purple creation going down to the ferry terminus. He had a briefcase, too, the same sort the shady sales rep with the drinking problem on the tram used to carry. You could tell he thought he was sharp, padded shoulders to his sports jacket, elevated soles, slick hair. Thought she was dolly enough to decorate his sleeve. Overwhelmed her. She didn’t used to smile at you then, or make room for you on the seat. You could tell he blocked out horizons, possibilities, with his size. When she was with him she had a sort of fluttery helpless look, like a butterfly with one wing caught under a windscreen wiper against the wind. He used to live off Hill Street, too, in an upmarket unit with a garden courtyard, a red trumpet vine growing chaotically over a latticed screen in front of the French windows. But he wasn’t there long.
Level with Pomfrey’s Lane there’s a deep ditch at the kerb, invisible to the unaware when it’s full after a downpour. You remember how it used to keep caving in every winter until the Council gave up trying to refill it. Traps like that you have to watch out for, commit to memory. The purple umbrella with the briefcase never understood that. You remember how he used to slip and trip on the same roots and potholes on the narrow stretch of jogging path above the river on Saturday mornings. He never remembered that the edges were loose and crumbly after rain, either. Especially in that one little spot, just on the other side of the crest where he always stopped for a breather, where the ground falls away to the river under a charade of tall grasses. Below it a straggling line of eucalypts hooks at the bank with crabbed roots. Heinrich used to have a spot like that, down by the creek at the reserve under the shroud of a thick-bodied willow. A secret place. But their faces were different, different expressions for shock.
Five paces to the left of the ditch you cross Hill Street on a diagonal and make an automatic correction to your course for home. The little corner store looks forlorn and neglected, its grimy windows half obscured by tattered newspaper headlines and icecream ads. The old shopkeeper in his frayed-at-the-elbows brown cardigan looks up as the bell on the door jangles. In the six years or so you’ve been coming in for odds and ends his English remains as limited as the day he stepped off the boat nearly forty years ago. His wife’s is worse. But the fruit and vegetables are first class, from his own garden. You never buy them anywhere else. Even so, the only response you ever get is dollars and cents in monotone. Today he shuffles out from behind the counter in his heelless leather slippers to retrieve the brown paper bag with your order in it from a corner. A separate small parcel in a plastic bag, square, sharp-cornered, protrudes from the top. He mutters something about not knowing you had a garden, and that he never uses that stuff for snails as you pay your money. He is still mumbling as you leave.
Last Friday it was raining, too. She only ever catches the ferry when it rains. Other times she takes the double-decker bus, but doesn’t trust it on the tight curves when the roads are wet. She’s a part-time librarian at the little municipal library on the other side of the bay. Three days a week she packs her lunch and something home-made for morning tea in her bag, leaves the house she shares with her sister at 8.15 am, and walks down to Hill Street past your place three blocks down on the corner. You always leave three minutes later. She likes home-baked slices best, the sort with the crumbly biscuit base. So does the widower next door. They swap recipes and sample each other’s baking over the front fence on Sunday mornings. He’s forty-two and has a car. One of those dodgy new Italian jobs in sleek red. No kids, though. He gave you a couple of fruit trees, self-sown, from his back yard the week before last, on Monday. Said they’d do well in a pair of big terra-cotta pots on the balcony.
He takes every second Monday off from the printers in town. You know the place, a big mirrored shopfront just along from the new arcade. He’s the boss. Reckons you have to take time out for the finer things, like gardening and cooking and bush-walking, otherwise a man can get stale, lose the incentive for life. He likes Earl Grey tea, just like Harry used to. But there’s Lapsang Soochong on the shelf in his pantry, too. Murky muck, like drinking brewed up chimney soot. You wouldn’t trust anyone who drank that sort of stuff, black-mooded and suspect. You don’t like his house, either, cluttered up with all kinds of alien contraptions, African masks, grotesque wooden New Guinea totems, carved Tongan oars, a Peruvian ceremonial headdress, other rubbish from God knows where. You can’t imagine her feeling comfortable in a place like that, sipping tea, an oceanic density of faces weighing down on her from the walls.
His face is familiar, too, but you can’t fit it to anyone. No definite place to fix it either, like some displaced thing… emerging, gliding into consciousness, then submerging again like a shark from some unfathomed depth. It gnaws at you, but remains sardonically silent, as if its proper place in the order of things is rendered in black and white, like a negative, left undeveloped. Head down against the rain’s saturating intent, you almost miss where the little concrete path to the front door of the flats diverges from grey asphalt. You back-track a few steps, traverse its bland band-aid, unlock the glass access door, your fingers slippery on key and handle.
At least your place is clean. Sterile, almost, a manifestation of the same fetish with which you scrub your body in the shower. Its heat eases the seeping chill from bone and joint, closes the cracks where illness might creep in. Your mother was always fussy about that. Kept you coccooned in the mesh of home-knitted warmth for every season, even summer. She never did replace Heinrich, although she tried for a time. Perhaps she knew instinctively that men would inevitably betray her, that the only way to ensure another woman wouldn’t suffer her fate was to inculcate you with the proper respect for fragile things. That’s how she was all her life, too easy to shatter, like Amy. You read about it in the newspapers… Woman’s Body Found… aborted and battered. The mafiosa brothers-in-law were eventually charged. Claimed it was justified retribution for their brother’s death, that she’d been having an illicit affair and plotted his murder with her lover. No nobility, no respect, everything reduced to sordid suspicion. Mother was right, and Harry, about betrayal.
The problem with people, Harry’d say, the real problem, is on the inside, where you can’t see it. They got secret places where they stow all their miseries and it turns them sour like gripes in the gut that spit out all over you. Worse, some of them’ve got other things, dark things, in the bowels, all twisted and turning, screwing at their insides ‘til they get out. That’s when you got to watch out, lad. That’s the sort that does you in, murders you, quiet-like, when you’re not looking.
In the kitchen you unpack your shopping, carefully place the square, plastic-wrapped parcel at the back of the pantry, put the fruit and vegetables away in the crisper. You leave the thin paper bag from the newsagent ‘til last. A cryptic crossword book and a glossy collection of recipes, Family Circle Delicious Desserts. Not that you’ve ever had much of a sweet tooth, but you might do some baking later, maybe even tonight if the rain holds. But especially on Monday morning.
Mondays are one of those empty sorts of days with nothing much to do, except go for a stroll if the weather’s clear, look at the gardens, the latest face-lifts to pokey little houses jumbled either side of assorted brush fences, hedges, stone walls. Just like Tuesdays. Last Tuesday was sunny, in a weak, change-of-season sort of way. She read a book after lunch, curled up in the clutch of an old armchair in the sun-trap of the front-room window. She looked delicate, fragile in the expanse of its maw, an apparition exuded by the roses blooming beneath the window. They made you remember the pink roses you sent, anonymously, to the crematorium for Amy’s funeral. And how your mother looked, strangely lifted from care and smooth-faced above the bouquet of roses on her bosom in the casket thirty-one years later. Years curiously absent, somehow dissolved by the sameness of the roses.
It disturbed you to see her there in the window, reflections playing with her face in the glass above those roses. You would have given anything for it to have rained, then, washed the window clean of deceitful sun. Or thunder, to shatter the pane. The bruised purple of a sudden sky would have made it bearable. When she stretched and rose from the chair it was as if the room reached out to swallow her and she didn’t come back to her book. You put your head down and walked fast, then. But tomorrow it will be raining, and her umbrella will be like a bright, full-blown rose offered up under your window for the brief time of passing.
You carry the crossword book into the lounge, place it on the coffee table and stand at the window. A dank odour rises from the shoes drying out on the bar-heater. Briefly you wonder if the fat woman’s husband leaves odours around the house like that, if that’s the reason she treats him with such contempt. Mother never minded them. But then, the fat woman doesn't look the motherly type, except to the Pekinese. It has a red silk cushion with tassels on it in front of the front-room fire in winter and a fluffy sheepskin on a couch in summer. The widower has red silk cushions on the chintzy-looking couches in his lounge-room, with a thick Persian carpet on the floor. You don’t trust that. With all the masks and things on the walls the place looks like a lush’s parlour. No inkling of a woman’s hand there, either. He’s had the place done over since his wife died. You wonder whether she was buried or cremated. He didn’t mention her, and there weren’t any photos on the mantelpiece, and no flowers. He grows roses in his front garden, though. One of them a red so dark it’s almost black, its velvet heart deep as a permanent wound.
Different to the flowers you always keep next to your mother’s picture in its own little niche in the wall-unit like a shrine. You can’t understand anyone who doesn’t keep their reverence pure. Perhaps he didn’t really care, after all. Didn’t hold her sacred enough not to betray her. You couldn’t exempt someone like that from suspicion. And she’s too fragile, too innocent to be able to see him clearly. You can’t allow him to despoil her.
You turn from the window, catch the slivered glimpse of something side-on, a face, peering back at you between capricious runnels of rain. It shifts in the half-light. You rake the curtains across and switch on the lamp in the corner. You don’t want him here. Your mother did, once, but she’s gone now, and he was the one that started it all, anyway… the misery. He never comes back in the shaving mirror or while you’re dressing in the morning, only ever in the twilight, between the gaps in the rain. He was the one who first took you walking along the creek at the reserve, first showed you that secret place. It wasn’t really Heinrich’s, he was just a usurper. You look at the bookshelf for reassurance. Yes, your triumph is still untouched, still where it’s supposed to be, the indisputable evidence of his eradication.
The spine of the white wedding album is yellowed with age. Once it was protected with plastic, long since turned brittle, curled and peeling back from its obligations. It’s the only one you kept with his picture in. And that only because of her, how beautiful she looked on her wedding day. Only now he’s faceless above the cravat, standing next to his bride at the altar, outside the church, cutting the cake, in the wedding waltz. He left when you were eight, but you had to wait until you buried her before you could exorcise his grinning ghost. He almost looked innocent, then. But each cut of the razor dissembled the facade. You never really knew where he went. But then, you went away yourself for a while just after, although you don’t remember where. Just your mother bringing you home again on the train from someplace in the country. She never talked about him after that.
Under the stark fluorescent light in the kitchen you set the jug to boil for tea, unwrap the little rack of lamb from its butcher’s plastic and season it with herbs while you wait for the oven to preheat. The frilly curtains at the window are splashed with yellow lemons and red cherries, buckling and ruched into each other by the ties either side. Outside the top of a date palm points its wet, shaking fingers at you through the reflections, half-formed monsters in its writhing Medusa’s head - an agony of contorted faces invading your own as if your flesh isn’t yours anymore. Hands trembling, you pull at the curtain-ties, send a swirl of cherries and lemons cascading into the treacherous gap. The palm’s final stab knifes out of the rain to slide neatly through the split-second closure. His face, yours… the widower’s, hollowed out of light and blackening shadows. Flat, fickle forms moving with the stealth of a traitor in the dark. The roasting dish clatters to the floor, its contents spilling onto the vinyl tiles, and the room goes down spinning with it.
The ceiling is empty. White, no shadows. A long fluorescent fixture its only ornament, with a floating curtain rail hovering beneath. A blank space. It reminds you of that other blank, white place with blank, white walls. No shadows there, either… no thought, no emotion. A nothing place. Before…
What? Not before him, he was there before then. Before… Harry? Amy…? Her… ? You don’t know, can’t think, can’t… see. What? …Your mother picking flowers for a funeral? …The brick with all the blood on it lying in the grass beside the creek?
No, that place had grey walls, and pale, grey-blue membranes that shrieked at the rending apart. They still had shadows behind them, faint, lost shadows without names. No shadows here now, just blank, white emptiness. Somewhere in the far distance there is pain. You struggle to find your feet but the pain won’t let you, won’t let you stand up straight like you have to at funerals, beside her, holding her arm to comfort her…
You are waiting for the nurse to come and give you an injection, but she doesn’t come and the pain comes closer. It creeps up your legs like a red trumpet vine and squeezes your belly. Its head crawls up your spine ‘til it reaches your skull. That’s when you scream. The ceiling shatters. Comes down on you in heavy, wet clouds of smoke and your shoes are burning. You wonder why you can’t feel your feet burning, too, why your legs are suddenly so long they can reach into the next room. Why you left your feet jammed up against a bar-heater. And then the clouds are inside your head, and in your chest. You can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t see… the flowers… the roses, the roses as red-gold as flames… curling up, curling at edges… withering in the rain…
…and the deck is rolling, riding away from under you, slippery with salt-slick. You are sliding, sliding… under the rail towards the water, the salty abrasions stinging in the air.
©Jennifer A Martiniello.
Finalist, Ginninderra Press Short Story Competition, 2002.
Published in Betrayals, Ginninderra press (2002).
