Isobel Blackthorn's Blog, page 47

I should have done something sooner

I should have done something sooner. That’s what my neighbour said. Best nipped in the bud. A good hard slap across the face will shut her up. Said she never had any trouble in the playground after that. But my best friend’s husband was right about me. I’m a coward. And cowards cower. They don’t punch or slap. I found that out about myself in my old school playground. Now I was a teacher with a demon of a boss who had never outgrown the playground thug.

I was working at a new school. The kids were friendly and polite. The principal had vision. And I didn’t mind that my classroom was a leaky old hut that was sinking on its stumps. I had a pleasant view of rolling pasture.  I made friends with the other teachers. Soon it was obvious the principal had taken a shine to me. And that was probably how it all began.

First it was a dismissive wave of her hand. Or a bollocking when I forgot to return the text books. I would swallow my humiliation. She was, after all, my boss.

She drew me into her warped little world, made me her ally and included me in her plots and schemes against her enemies. She even warned me off making friends with the entire geography department who were all loose cannons according to her. I can’t believe I never made a friend in geography. I love geography.

I should have done something when she stormed into class and yelled at me in front of thirty kids. I froze where I stood with the whole class staring until she left, slamming the door behind her. She apologised later but it’s hard to trust an apology when you know she’ll do it again.

I should have done something when my class of year twelves used my lessons to complain about the way she treated them. You should be the head, they’d said. We like you. Which was nice to hear but it didn’t change a thing.

I should have done something when she locked all the resources in the departmental  storeroom and kept the only key. She’s nuts, I thought  at the time and my union rep, who had a key for everywhere, helped me steal paper and exercise books from other departments. He had a weird way of dealing with things.

I did complain to the deputy principal and was told all department heads were the same and to take no notice.

Maybe I should have done something more but only the kids would believe me. Or more likely no-one wanted to hear it.

So I left. I left not before I slapped her – that was never going to happen. I left before she slapped me.

It proved a wise move. She left too, not long after, for slapping my successor across the face.

That slap had my name on it.

The thing my best friend’s husband doesn’t know is that cowards don’t just cower. They also walk away. And that takes courage.

04 Nov 2014
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: bullying, short story

Asylum – Part Two

To catch the beginning of this story go to Asylum – a novel in weekly parts

…in which Yvette confronts the squallor of her friend Thomas’ flat…

PART TWO
2.1

Yvette stood in the aisle beside her back-row seat. Behind her the other passengers jostled for a place in the tightly-packed queue. After a ten-hour bus ride, another hour in transit to Tullamarine airport, and a tedious three hour wait for a smooth four-hour flight across the desert guts of Australia, her skin felt dirty and sticky and she hankered for somewhere, anywhere, quiet, cool and still.

Instead, the steward opened the plane’s rear door and Perth greeted Yvette with a gust of hot, dry air. November, and it must have been a hundred degrees.

The heat was at once exotic and familiar, the heat Yvette grew up with in Perth, the sort of heat she craved all those years in London, the heat that drew her to Malta. Heading for the shelter of the concrete and glass building across the tarmac, she felt exhilarated, until memory stabbed its black through her head and, for a few seconds, she was light-headed. She breathed deeply and stared down at the tarmac. She was back at primary school. How she loathed that school. More than anything she loathed morning assembly.

 

The morning sun was hot. Young as she was, to her English eyes the Headmaster looked absurdly casual in a short-sleeved shirt and shorts and carefully-measured socks. But Yvette took him seriously as he lectured the rows of kids with stern authority. Only she couldn’t listen. She stood at the back of her class queue, eyes fixed on the flag pole, willing the Australian flag to billow. It hung, limply, and she went limp inside and staggered across the playground to the toilets.

She was six, a timid, scrawny Pom, an easy target for those rowdy Australian kids. She avoided them. At recess and lunchtimes she sat on a bench in the shade of the peppermint gum furthest from the tuck shop. She fed the hard lump in her belly with marmalade sandwiches. Her mother couldn’t understand why she insisted on marmalade. She couldn’t understand it either at the time. Now she knew. Marmalade was bitter. Even then she had a sense of the symbolic.

Weeks passed and she adjusted, to the heat, the buildings and the smell of gum leaves, but not to the Aussie kids. She made two friends, Melissa Kovac, a pretty, wide-eyed girl from Bosnia, and Heather McAllister, who immediately became Yvette’s best friend. Heather was a plump girl with curly black hair and blue-green eyes, whose family arrived in Australia from Scotland about the same time as Yvette’s. Heather was in the same class and they sat together in the shade of the peppermint gum to eat their lunch. Yvette’s sandwich progressed from marmalade to lemon butter, still tart yet smooth and creamy.

Melissa’s family moved to Melbourne about a year later and Yvette hadn’t heard from her since. And when Yvette was twelve and her family left for England she lost touch with Heather.

Yvette might have made an effort to keep in touch. Yet she’d preferred to keep Heather locked in her past. For a reason strange to her, she suffered an absurd resistance to maintaining old friendships. Friends frozen like photographs, with the same values, interests and beliefs they’d had when she’d known them, moss-gatherers while only she rolled through life like a bare pebble seeking new experiences. Even Thomas. Last time they had met he was recovering after being punched in the face by an angry young woman on the London Underground. His pride bruised more than his eye. And he was furious with Yvette for laughing so hard rivulets of mascara ran down her cheeks. Now she was apprehensive. She had to force herself to embrace the possibility that Thomas was a little less paranoid and a little more trusting, and in the six months he’d lived in Perth, absorbed some of the laid-back Australian way of life.

The big acoustic chamber of the arrival’s lounge housed a muted cacophony of bustling and chatter, thumps and squeaking trolley wheels, and a clear high voice piercing above the rest with announcements. Yvette squeezed by a clutch of women with small children and noticed Thomas hovering beside a row of seats. He greeted her with a light kiss on her cheek. His round face, full lips and sharp blue eyes were exactly as she recalled. Short and sturdy, dressed in a tight-fitting white T-shirt and jeans, shaven head framing his unshaven face, he’d taken on a sort of George Michael style, without the pizzazz.

‘Good to see you,’ he said.

She wasn’t convinced he meant it. His eyes darted from her face to her feet and scanned nervously about the lounge. She was sporting a baggy purple T-shirt hanging over a pair of punky drain-pipes, streaks of black and lurid-pink on a white background. When she’d found them in the Cobargo Op shop she’d been ecstatic, the village instantly more appealing. Surrounded now by suntanned folk in shorts and thongs and others dressed uniformly in Kmart Chic, she suddenly felt ridiculous. She felt an overwhelming desire to merge, to belong to the ordinary. And an equally powerful urge to stand apart.

‘Let’s go.’ She handed Thomas the canvass holdall her mother had given her before grabbing a stray copy of The West Australian folded on a nearby seat. Then she adjusted the handles of her travelling bag that were pinching her shoulder and they headed for the exit doors.

It took Thomas five minutes to remove the heavy metal contraption he’d locked to the steering wheel of his Honda Civic. A vintage model painted a lurid pea-green, the car had the appearance of a jelly bean. At last he started the engine and crunched the gear stick into reverse.

Yvette sat back in her seat in bemused silence as he manoeuvred the car out of the car park, his face riven with tense concentration. Heading towards the city, he drove slowly in the inside lane of a stretch of dual carriageway, cars sweeping past on the right. She didn’t mind his caution. It afforded a leisurely chance to take in the streetscape. And she was shocked by the expansion of the American occupation that had occurred in her absence – a visual famine she hadn’t taken in at the blinkered age of twelve – the sprawl of car showrooms and petrol stations, discount warehouses and furniture display rooms, McDonalds and KFC and Hungry Jacks, and drive-through bottle shops to wash down the cultural bilge, all manner of businesses advertising themselves with blatant disregard for any aesthetic. O’Keeffe would have packed up her easel in disgust.

‘I can’t believe what’s happened to this place,’ she said. ‘And there’s no cohesion, just a ribbon of businesses each with its own car park. Not even a connecting footpath. What were the town planners thinking?’

Without moving his head, Thomas sniggered in that distinctly Thomas way of his, at once familiar and comforting. ‘American-style self-promotion,’ he said.

‘Gaudy and loud.’

‘A poverty of style.’

‘A mishmash lacking civic pride.’

They both laughed, but another part of her sank flat as the landscape, hoping with every passing set of traffic lights that the appearance of this metropolis would improve the closer they inched towards its centre.

An hour later, Thomas turned down a tree-lined street in Maylands, pulling up in the car park outside a block of high-rise flats. Yvette looked with dismay at the plain brick building fringed with rows of concrete balconies, the whole edifice totally devoid of charm.

There was no lift. She gave Thomas the holdall and, following behind him,  heaved her travelling bag up six flights of concrete stairs, entering a carpeted corridor that smelt faintly acrid, stopping about half-way down on the left. She braced herself for what was to come.

Sure enough, the flat was vile. A rectangular room painted institutional cream, partitioned at the end by a kitchen bench. Beyond the kitchen was a sliding door leading to a balcony. Opposite the kitchen bench, a door led to a bedroom and through it, a windowless bathroom. She took in at a glance the plain grey sofa, small Formica dining table and three padded vinyl chairs, and in the bedroom, a battered melamine wardrobe and a double-bed mattress on the floor. The lack of bars on the windows and a key to open the front door were all that prevented her from screaming, ‘let me out of here!’

Hiding her displeasure, she turned to Thomas. ‘Thanks so much for letting me stay.’

‘I left the fridge on.’

As she went to open the fridge door he said, ‘but it’s empty.’ He hesitated. ‘There’s a shop round the corner.’ He glanced at his watch then caught her eye with an apologetic smile. ‘Anthony’s due at my place soon.’

She fought an urge to cry.

‘I’ll call you later.’ And he left.

 

2.2

 

She slid open the door to the balcony and stepped outside. The view was impressive in a modern kind of way; the jacarandas and the gum trees, the suburban rooftops and the Perth city skyline to the west. There was a satisfying depth of field, pleasing variations of height, but the light was too brash, the detail too bland to warrant the sharpening of a pencil.

She was about to lean over the concrete wall to survey the ground below when she noticed a black bin liner in the far corner of the balcony. Loosely knotted, the blow fly buzzing around was sure to find a point of entry. She picked up the bag by its knot and recoiled, the distinct smells of rancid food and rotten meat so strong she caught her breath. She propped open the front door, grabbed the bag and dashed downstairs. Rows of green wheelie bins were lined up along a fence. She hurled the bag into one and followed a trail of fetid drips back to the flat.

Deciding to make the best of things, she used the skerrick of washing up liquid and the old rag Thomas had left beside the sink and cleaned the cupboards, inside and out, and the benches, cooker, fridge and floor. Then, she walked to the shops. She didn’t buy much. Partly because she was broke, and partly because whatever she did buy she had to lug up those stairs. She returned with two carrier bags of groceries.

Entering the flat again she recoiled. Was this a conspiracy of town planners and architects to depress the senses of the populace, render them dim-witted, numb and complacent, passive acceptors of the institutionalisation of everywhere? She had to summon all her resolve to endure it.

She divested the shopping bags of their contents, putting the milk, butter and eggs in the fridge along with a small selection of vegetables, and the tea, sugar, a tin of tomatoes and a packet of pasta in one of the cupboards. Then she unpacked, setting free of her clothes a handful of cutlery, a bowl, two plates, two glasses and two mugs, and an old kettle and a toaster her mother had been keeping for a daughter-leaving-home eventuality. When done she filled the kettle and made a mug of tea, taking up one of the vinyl chairs and opening the newspaper, curious to see what passed for news in this state.

She waded through the usual bashings, drug hauls, rich and glitz scandals and political storms, stopping to read with mild interest a piece on a stand-off between Australia and Indonesia over a boat of asylum seekers, neither country prepared to take the people to shore. What a ludicrous scenario. Someone has to show some humanity. Otherwise, what are those folk to do? – Bob about in the ocean forever?

She closed the paper in disgust and took a cool shower. Then she made the bed with the sheets her mother had given her and lay down, staring at the light globe hanging in the centre of the ceiling. What now? She thought of reading a book but she didn’t have one. She couldn’t listen to music. She’d left her CDs, along with her jewellery, lap top, photos, sketches, paints and brushes in Carlos’ house. She didn’t even have a radio. And the silence was claustrophobic. She reached for her shoulder bag leaning against the skirting board and rummaged about for a pencil and her sketch book.

She leafed through ten sketches of dead trees, none of them worthy of her pencil’s attention. Arriving at a blank page, she was unexpectedly crowded by memories, prisoners straining the highwire fence she’d long ago erected in her mind.

Perhaps returning to Perth wasn’t such a good idea.

She drew a large oval and marked out where in the face the nose and eyes would go. His portrait. The one she painted in that first year here. She was so proud. She’d given him a shock of black hair, large ears, round eyes set close together, a long nose with flaring nostrils and a wide mouth full of dagger-like teeth. Looking back she viewed the work her one expressionist masterpiece. Her mother thought she’d captured him delightfully well. She supposed she had. Her father wasn’t stupid, although her mother liked to call him gormless. He wasn’t mad either, but when he smiled he had an air of mad stupidity, the sort of stupid, senseless madness that transfigured, along with his countenance, into something terrifying when his anger was triggered. Which was as often as sunrise. He wasn’t a powerful man, lanky and barrel-chested, with sloping shoulders and a nervous blink. Her mother had other names for him. Sometimes she called him a silly old sod or face-ache. She must have hated him. Yvette loved him. Which was why, when he saw her portrait of him and ripped it to pieces, she cried.

Yvette closed her sketch book then her eyes.

 

Thomas phoned late that evening.

‘How are you settling in?’ he said.

‘I’ve been cleaning up a bit,’ she said, brightly. ‘I removed the bin liner you left out on the balcony.’

‘Oh, that? It wasn’t mine. It was there when I moved in.’

Yvette’s upper lip curled of its own accord. Thomas wasn’t the most hygienic of men, the sheets on his bed in his functional London flat looked and smelt so grimy when he offered her the choice between his bed and the couch she always took the couch.

She accepted his invitation to dinner at his place the following evening, curious to see what sort of home he now had, and hung up her phone.

Deciding she’d had enough of the day, she turned to switch off the kitchen light. Something small and black scuttled across the floor. She thought best to ignore it. She brushed her teeth and changed into a T-shirt for bed. Back in the kitchen she opened a cupboard for a glass. Inside, scurrying to the back of the cupboard were three shiny, black insects. She opened the other cupboard doors. And there they were in all of them, crawling, scurrying, feeling their way about with long antennae.

Cockroaches.

She keeled with revulsion. Worse than ants, worse than flies, ranking joint-first with rats in her hierarchy of vile and dirty pests. And they were everywhere. One had even found its way into the fridge.

She slammed shut the cupboard doors and rinsed then filled her glass in the bathroom. Hoping the roaches had not found their way into the bedroom she rolled a towel and rammed it into the crack under the living-room door. She switched off the light and closed her eyes. She dared not open them for fear of glimpsing in the gloom a roach crawling up the wall beside the bed.

 

2.3

 

Thomas’s unit was four streets closer to the city in the adjacent suburb of Mount Lawley. It was a warm evening. Yvette walked along the flat, suburban streets dodging the spray from garden sprinklers watering the carefully mown lawns. She admired the canopy the Jacarandas made, their floral display of purple trumpets, fallen blooms dusting the pavement like fat confetti. Had she been more like Séraphine Louis and less Georgia O’Keeffe in her artistic approach, more inclined to chaos than control, she would have been in creative paradise right here on these pavements.

Instead, she kept walking, determined to make the most of her new life in Perth, determined, therefore, to enjoy whatever social delights Thomas had to offer.

Accessed by an external walkway, Thomas’s unit was on the second floor of a brick building fashioned in the style of government housing. The door to the unit was ajar so she pushed it open and entered straight into a steam-filled kitchen. Thomas was frantically snatching handfuls of spaghetti out of the sink and tossing them into a colander. On the cooker, on hard boil, a saucepan brimming with bolognaise sauce spluttered madly.

‘Can I help?’ she said.

Thomas emitted a small yelp before plonking a lid over the colander. Regaining his composure, he said. ‘Are you early?’

‘No. Bang on time. Smells terrific.’

She kissed his cheek before sitting down at a small wooden table. Beyond the kitchen, the living room was the same in size and appeal as her flat. A jumbled mess of books, papers, clothing and towels occupied every seat and the whole of the floor, except for a small area over by a music stand and Thomas’s violin.

Thomas handed her a glass of red wine.

‘Where’s Anthony?’ she said.

‘He didn’t turn up.’ A look of dejection appeared in his face. He seemed close to tears. ‘It isn’t working.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He turned to fetch the colander. She sipped the wine. It had a sharp, metallic twang.

‘What’s the problem?’ she asked.

‘He won’t commit. He says he wants an open relationship.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. Really, what could she say?

‘Me too,’ he said with his back to her.

He piled spaghetti onto plates, placed the saucepan on a board in the centre of the table and offered her a ladle.

‘Help yourself to sauce.’

‘Thanks.’ Keen to reinforce her solidarity, she said, ‘You didn’t move half-way round the world to share him with other men.’

‘He’s always been a butterfly. But I thought he wanted me.’ Thomas poured two ladles of sauce onto his spaghetti, thrust in his fork and twisted furiously then shovelled the dribbling bulk into his mouth. She twirled a few spaghetti strands on her fork without looking up at him. Poor guy.

‘I don’t know how you can stay with him,’ she said, realising as she spoke she had been doing just that with Carlos until she fell pregnant.

‘We might be splitting up.’

‘What will you do? Go back to England?’ She had to repress an unwarranted feeling of abandonment.

‘I thought about it. But I’ve bought this place now.’

She couldn’t see how anyone could bond with a unit like this. But she felt relieved.

‘And then there’s my job,’ he continued, reaching behind him for the stained tea towel on the draining board to wipe his mouth.

‘Computer programming? I thought you hated it.’

He avoided her gaze. ‘It pays well and my colleagues are friendly. I seem to fit in.’

She let his justifications slip by without challenge.

They spent the rest of the evening lying diagonally on his unmade bed, discussing art, poetry and music, an elixir of conversation. They finished one bottle of wine and opened another. Yvette felt drawn to him, not physically, but there was an intimacy between them, born of affection and shared history. They reminisced. Long walks on Hampstead Heath. Sunday mornings at Camden Market. The cinemas, pubs and cheap restaurants they’d frequented. Of the two weeks he’d spent with her in Malta. How they’d visited the old temples and strolled along the rocky beaches where the limestone cliffs met the ocean, their voices raised against the wind, dissecting the ravaged body of the island’s culture with their scalpel-sharp minds. An island settled by stone-age farmers thousands of years before first the Greeks, the Phoenicians then the Romans came along. Embroiled in the Byzantine Wars, colonised by Arab rulers from Sicily, then back to the West in the hands of the Normans, eventually ending up part of the British Empire. Poor beleaguered Malta, in sixty-four its people finally gained independence after many thousands of years, only now to be colonised by tourists, who at least, they had to agree, went home after their generally less harmful pillaging.

‘I identified with the island so much,’ she said, ‘I refused to mix with the foreigners. Even the market traders. But the locals were a closed group.’

‘So you fell in with Carlos.’

‘That’s an interesting way of putting it.’

‘Well, you’re here now. Malta is the past.’

She buried her face in her hands. He had no idea how much his words stung. He couldn’t fathom the depths of her attachment to that island. And she hadn’t told him she’d fallen pregnant. She didn’t want him to know Carlos had coerced her into having a termination. Now, with a hollow heart and a resistant mind, she faced the bland suburban landscape of Perth, with its suburban values, suburban aspirations, inane, urbane and nauseatingly bourgeois. She had no idea how she’d find her way. One part of her craved security. Another craved adventure. Both were drawn by the allure of the fortune-teller’s prophecy. It was all she had to hold on to.

She left shortly after eleven. She could have stayed up all night but Thomas had to work tomorrow. And she had to find work. Casual work. Cash in hand. But she wouldn’t clean motel rooms again.

 

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: asylum seekers, domestic violence, free novel, illegals

Asylum – Part One (cont)

if you missed the beginning of this story go to Asylum – a novel in weekly parts

1.2

A red-gum log burned gently in the wood heater. Leah was watching Days of Our Lives, her week days cleaved by an unfathomable obsession with frothy melodrama. Yvette gazed out the window.  She had no tolerance for her mother’s habit. To her, the soaps were shallow, over-acted, lip-quivering drivel. She couldn’t bring herself to admit she had enough going on inside her to fill an entire series.

Outside, a fierce southerly buffeted the grevilleas and bottle brushes. Leah said she lost a shrub every year. Snaps off right at the base and rolls about like spinifex. Yvette watched the shrubs cower. She felt adrift, her own roots shallow, their grasp in the soil of a stable life tenuous. Her mother’s soap addiction reinforcing feelings of tremendous isolation. Leah was an impossible anchor. She had an astonishing capacity to get on with the practical day-to-day that alienated Yvette at every turn. She’d rather her mother thrashed and flailed like a shrub decapitated by that uncompromising wind. At least now and then. If only she would let down her reserve.

In an effort to relieve her listless mood, Yvette flicked through the local paper that her mother had brought back from her bi-weekly run into the village. When she came to the last pages she scanned the small ads. The Cobargo Hotel needed a cleaner. She felt a swirl of contempt, her life come to this. Yet it was the only listing. In deference to her mother, she waited for the adverts then dialled the number, hoping the job would be cash-in-hand.

A woman answered.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Yvette Grimm. I’m calling about the cleaning job.’

‘Are you new in town?’

Straight way she knew she was too well-spoken to be a local, too well-spoken to be a cleaner too but she kept those thoughts to herself. ‘I’m Debbie Smith’s sister,’ she said, knowing as she spoke that the claim was an appeal for acceptance.

‘Ah.’ The woman warmed to her. Maybe there was some advantage in being known as Debbie’s sister. She started work the following Thursday.

 

It was a cool and sunny day. Heading for the hotel, Yvette walked down to the village, glancing up the road at the Catholic Church as she crossed the bridge over the creek. Debbie’s farm was a short walk further on. Since her return Debbie had been away visiting her sister-in-law. She’d returned yesterday. And she’d be at home now. Her boys at school. Alan in the paddocks with the cows. The sisterly thing would be to call in after the shift.

She pulled open the heavy wooden door of the hotel and went through to the bar, long and dark with too much tacky chrome. A sickly odour of yesterday’s beer perfumed the air. She nodded at the old man seated on a stool over by the cigarette machine, who gave her a languid smile. Otherwise, the bar was empty.

Before long, a middle-aged woman appeared. She was in her thirties, dressed as if ready for the beach in T-shirt, shorts and thongs, her blonde hair pinned back in a ponytail. ‘G’day,’ she said. ‘You must be Yvette. I’m Brenda.’ She grinned as she gave Yvette a single appraising sweep of her eye. ‘Come with me.’

She followed Brenda across the car park to the cleaner’s storeroom, located in the centre of a row of motel rooms. Brenda talked her through the cleaning procedures, detailed and exacting, and handed her a bunch of keys. ‘Cash all right?’

‘That’s fine.’ Thank god, but already she was sinking at the prospect of the work ahead. The view of the rolling hills and the mountains did nothing to loosen the tightening knot of resistance in her guts.

She wheeled the cleaning trolley from one stuffy, pastel-coloured room to another. She stripped and re-made beds, emptied bins, polished, mopped and vacuumed. She did it all with no enthusiasm whatsoever. She earned ten dollars per room, slave wages, and only by cleaning three rooms per hour did she feel the work remotely close to worthwhile. She hated it. Her back hated it. Her self-esteem sloshed with the grime at the bottom of the mop bucket.

She walked back to her mother’s house without glancing at the road to her sister’s farm.

 

1.3

 

Yvette spent the solstice weeks in a numb haze. She helped in the garden, her mowing lawns, pruning, weeding and harvesting all performed under Leah’s watchful eye, as if she were poised to kill or maim a darling member of the floral kingdom any moment. She soon decided her mother’s passion for gardening was fanatical and unbearably tedious – Who cared if this year’s blooms won first prize in the show?

One afternoon, she could endure the watcher no more and downed tools feigning exhaustion to sit in the warm sun with a sketch book and pencil. She idly traced the lines of a dead tree in the neighbour’s paddock, pathetic efforts, knowing what she was capable of. She missed the luxury of her studio space and ready access to materials at Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art, luxuries she had taken for granted at the time.

Later, while her mother enjoyed her soaps, she lay on her single bed, isolated and apart. She felt tattered. A teddy bear come apart at the seams. All her stuffing gone. About now she’d have been plump about the belly, all flushed and expectant and busy knitting booties. She met the gaze of the forlorn girl in the print above her bed. Poor little girl. What tragedy wrecked her?

She knew she was wallowing in her gloom. Yet she had latched on to her loss with an unrelenting clasp. She had to let go, she would let go, she was poised to do just that, but not yet. Although even now her dogged sadness had begun to feel ridiculous.

When the living room went silent and she heard the fly screen bang shut she traipsed to the living room and slumped on the sofa. Moments later the fly screen banged again. Yvette didn’t move. Then she sensed her mother standing over her. ‘Cheer up.’

‘I’m all right,’ she said. Leah had no inkling of Yvette’s abortion and Yvette wasn’t about to confide.

‘You haven’t seen Debbie since you arrived.’

‘She knows where I am,’ Yvette said, sourly.

‘She’s waiting for an invitation.’

‘It’s hard. We don’t get on.’ In her mind she was understating the emotional distance that had grown between them. They were estranged, Yvette had decided, having grown attached to the fact that only twice in their ten years apart had she received news directly from her sister and not via their mother, a card announcing the birth of each of her boys. She emitted a heavy sigh but her mother was steadfast, waving a finger in the direction of the telephone. Forcing down her own resistance, Yvette swung her legs to the floor. Satisfied, her mother went outside.

With no expectation of anything beneficial arising from this coerced reunion, Yvette lifted the receiver and stabbed the numbers on the keypad. A female voice answered.

‘Hi. It’s Yvette,’ she said, flatly

‘Yvette! How are you?’

‘Good. And you?’

‘Great to hear your voice. Welcome back!’

‘Thanks.’

They chatted about the old times Yvette didn’t care to remember, of their childhood days in Perth, teenage years in London. After what seemed an eon of small talk, she succumbed to an impulse to be convivial and invited Debbie over for coffee.

The following afternoon she watched an old Holden ute buck and bounce down the long dirt track, pulling up beside the machinery shed. A figure of average build, dressed in baggy pants and a sky-blue T-shirt, walked in strides towards the house with the easy-going gait of the Australian country woman. Yvette knew the woman was Debbie but strained to recognise in her the Debbie she’d grown up with – a cute, freckle-faced, impish girl with a self-conscious smile. She looked to Yvette now like every other twenty-something woman in the area, totally lacking in style. Her hair was long and brown and shapelessly cut. The T-shirt hung limply from her bust, the pants, on closer inspection, were pilling and the fawn crocs she sported to complete her outfit looked like foot boats. Yet her smile was warm, her brown eyes seemed genuine and Yvette softened in her company.

They sat in the garden on the north side of the house, sheltering from the cold southerly wind. Leah waved from the veranda and offered to make tea. She returned five minutes later with two mugs and a plate of Monte Carlos.

‘Why don’t you join us?’ Yvette said, suddenly craving relief from the intimacy of just the two of them.

Leah mumbled something about needing to clean the house. Yvette knew it was an excuse. The house was immaculate.

Debbie took a few sips of her tea before continuing to blether on about her two boys with that familiar need to prove her worth chiming with every comment. She glowed over their achievements at school – A merit award for this, a merit award for that, how good Peter was in the junior soccer team, the terrific progress Simon was making with the violin and how marvellous it was that they were both in the school choir performing at next year’s folk festival held at the Showground. Choir? At a folk festival? Forgetting she once loved to sing, Yvette couldn’t imagine any pursuit more cringe-worthy. She couldn’t countenance being part of anything amateur and looked down from an absurdly high height at anyone, young or old, who did.

She stared absently at the distant hills doing her best to be polite while fending off jealousy over the doting interest Debbie took in her boys. Her sister hadn’t the conversational grace to ask about the last decade of her life. But then again, it was probably better Debbie didn’t know how far her sister had drifted from their mother’s upright morality. Campus adventures as she limped from one boyfriend to the next. Then in Malta, where she’d taken unconventionality to a precipice with her flirtations in the iniquitous underworld of drugs and crime. It had been easy to do. Too easy. Easy to keep the truth from them too. Her letters contained the veneer of her studies at Art School then her site-seeing escapades with her best friend Josie and their glorious life in the sun. And as for her mother and sister, neither visited her once in that whole ten years. Not once.

A pair of parrots, splendidly red and green, perched on the bird table, chortling to each other. Yvette raised a hand to slide her hair behind her ears and they flew away. She was wondering how to divert her sister’s attention from her offspring when Debbie set her mug at her feet and said, ‘I dreamt about you last night.’ Her tone had an intimate ring. ‘You were standing on my veranda in a long red dress, with a gorgeous young man beside you.’

‘What happened?’

Debbie blushed. She seemed awkward. ‘Nothing,’ she said, averting her gaze. ‘But I had a strong sense you were meant to be together.’

The wind gusted from the south, blowing a shaft of Yvette’s hair in her face. She smoothed a hand across her cheek, feeling in her belly an echo of the childhood thrill of teasing her sister. She sat on the edge of her seat and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘That’s weird.’ She widened her eyes. ‘Maybe it’s a premonition.’

‘Don’t.’

‘It’s a coincidence at least.’ Yvette relished in the game. Debbie had always been easily spooked. ‘A psychic read my palm before I left Malta. I was in a nightclub and an old woman with leathery skin and a mystical look in her eyes took hold of my hand. She said I would meet the father of my children before I was thirty.’ And as she spoke, the words took on a potency they had lacked before that moment. As if in the telling she was imbuing the prophecy with all the significance of the cosmos.

‘She was probably drunk,’ Debbie said.

‘She wasn’t. She was emphatic. She grabbed my arm and told me he was definitely not the man I was with.’

‘Carlos?’

‘Carlos.’

‘She got that part right.’

‘What would you know?’ Yvette said, sharply.

‘Sorry.’

Their mother’s tortoiseshell cat flopped down at their feet and arched her back.

‘Maybe I was meant to come to Australia to find him.’ Her voice had gone all misty.

‘Who?’

‘The father of my children.’

She knew it was ludicrous but the prediction had suddenly given her hope. Although she couldn’t imagine encountering an Australian man she’d find desirable. None of the Aussie men she’d met had charisma, mystique or originality. They looked generic, they sounded generic and they were all into sport.

 

1.4

 

She was sitting in the living room, teasing her cuticles to better show the half-moons. Leah was glued to The Young and the Restless. The phone rang. ‘You answer it,’ her mother said without moving her eyes from the screen.

Yvette picked up the receiver expecting to hear her sister’s voice. Debbie was the only person who dared call during the daily soap-opera marathon. Instead, Yvette heard a heavily-accented male voice asking to speak to her. It was Carlos. Passion bolted through her. She slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor with her knees drawn to her chest. She wasn’t even sure she could speak. ‘Ciao,’ she managed.

‘Ciao, il mio amore.’

She was silent. He called her his love but she knew there was no substance to the words. He didn’t love her. He didn’t know how to love her. He didn’t have it in him to love anyone but himself. But she couldn’t stop her guts somersaulting.

‘Sono qui,’ he said, adding, slowly, in accented English, ‘The Gold Coast.’

He was here?

‘Yvette. Venga con me.’

Go with him? ‘No. Non posso.’ She had to resist.

‘Ho bisogno di te.’

He needed her? ‘Mi dispiace,’ she said.

‘Per favore.’

Why was he persisting?

‘Ti prego l’autobus,’ he said.

‘No. Non ho soldi Carlos.’

‘Yvette. Ti amo.’

‘Non ho soldi.’ She felt limp. Her excuse of poverty matched his assignation of love. Both vacuous.

She wanted to run to him, badly, wanted to spend her whole life by his side, live in his house, birth a gaggle of his babies, be immersed forevermore in the culture she loved. Instead, she hung up the phone wishing she’d never given him her mother’s number then slouched on the sofa with a hard lump in her throat, knowing it was going to be hard to exorcise that man from her heart.

 

1.5

 

Debbie called as the credits rolled on the last soap of the day and invited Yvette to a friend’s house for dinner. ‘You’ll like Tracy. She’s an artist. She’s your type.’

Yvette doubted it. She couldn’t imagine any of Debbie’s friends being her type. ‘Thanks for thinking of me. But…’

‘I’ll pick you up at five.’

‘What about Alan and the boys?’

‘Alan’s taking them on a scout camp.’

She didn’t feel like going, preferring the familiarity of her misery. Yet she couldn’t think of a way to decline so she agreed and hung up the phone.

‘Who was that?’ Leah said, switching off the television.

‘Debbie.’ She went on to explain the invitation.

‘It’ll do you good,’ Leah said.

She wasn’t convinced.

She didn’t bother to change out of the old jeans she wore as a teenager and the baggy red jumper which had become as symbolic to her as Lionus’ blanket. When she heard Debbie’s ute, she left her mother watching the news, catching a glimpse of the wreckage of a boat washed up on a beach by a wild sea, the voice-over announcing at least twenty-two asylum seekers dead in the capsize. She paused then went outside, barely absorbing what she’d seen. In Malta, boat arrivals from Somalia were a frequent occurrence, never to a warm reception; the Maltese government claiming with good foundation that the island was in the front line and if they didn’t impose a deterrent the floodgates would open. Yvette had been as indifferent then as she was now, too busy with the travails of her own life to care much about the lives of others.

Instead, as she opened the passenger door she wondered how her mother coped with her small and dreary life. How she would never, ever, end up living like that.

‘Hi sis. So pleased to have you back,’ Debbie said fondly. ‘Truly I am.’

‘Thanks.’ She forced a smile.

‘How are you finding it here? Bit of a change from your old life eh?’

‘It’s strange.’ She couldn’t help sounding distant.

Debbie threw the gearstick into reverse and hit the accelerator, the ute lunging backwards towards their mother’s rose bed. She braked, changed gear and hit the accelerator again, the ute charging through the paddock, juddering over the cattle grid and bumping over every rut and pothole in the track.

‘You’ll get used to it,’ Debbie said. Was she referring to her driving or Australia? Right now it was hard to decide which was the more precarious.

Debbie slowed as they neared the highway, making a right turn and cruising down the smooth tarmac to the village. ‘Maybe you’ll settle down.’

Yvette didn’t speak. They crawled through the village, Debbie accelerating hard up the hill on the other side. ‘Do you think you’ll stay here?’

‘I doubt it.’

This time Debbie made no comment.

Yvette stared out the window at the scenery: the majesty of the mountain to the north that presided over the landscape like a benevolent mother, now silhouetted against a darkening sky; the red gums and apple gums casting long shadows over undulating farmland; the granite outcrops and the cute weatherboard farm houses; and the mountains to the west slumbering beneath a wide band of soft apricot.

About five kilometres on, after a sharp bend to the left, Debbie told her to look out for a flitch-clad shack perched on a hill.

‘Nearly there,’ she said brightly.

‘So how do you know Tracy?’

‘She’s a voluntary scripture teacher at the primary school. She taught Buddhism to Peter and Simon.’

Debbie swung by the carcass of an old fridge and a rusty milk urn propped on its side on a trifurcated log and hurtled up a long and liberally cratered driveway.

Tracy greeted them at the door. She was a stocky and weather-beaten woman with wild black hair. Dressed in a baggy, striped jumper hanging loosely beneath paint-spattered dungarees, either the sort of artist who liked to throw paint around or inept at her craft. She led them into a poorly-lit room that smelled strongly of Nag Champa. Once Yvette’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, her senses were assailed. The room was filled with drab and grungy furniture. Two battered-looking sofas faced each other across a low-lying coffee table littered with magazines and ashtrays. Propped on an easel to the left was a large canvas streaked in black and grey acrylic, with a half-formed figure of a girl, open-mouthed and clutching her face in her hands. Tracy’s interpretation of an Edvard Munch. It was ghastly. To the right was the kitchen, partitioned from the rest of the room by a red-gum bench strewn with dirty cups and plates. In the centre of the room a fire glowed in a wood heater.

‘This is a charming house,’ Yvette said with contrived enthusiasm, scanning the clutter of books, papers and junk piled on shelves, tables and chairs.

‘It is,’ a man’s voice said. She peered into the room and made out the figure of a man coming through a far doorway. Tall, with dark hair, his lean torso defined in a tight T-shirt, eyes hidden behind a pair of black-framed sunglasses. Sensing she’d been set up, she was intrigued. She picked her way through Tracy’s clutter and held out her hand.

‘Hi. I’m Yvette.’

‘I know.’ He removed his sunglasses and looked at her intently, a smile lighting his face. She felt herself blushing.

‘Yvette, this is Terry,’ Tracy called from the kitchen. ‘Terry Ford,’ she added, as if his full name would mean something. It didn’t, but the man before Yvette suddenly did. He had a broad, rugged face, with thin lips and deep-set brown eyes. Behind him, she noticed chinks of twilight filtering through gaps in the flitches. Immediately, he became the subject of a Gainsborough, a nobleman of the seventeen hundreds bedecked in rustic finery, a crosscut saw held proudly to his chest like a hunting pistol.

‘Take a seat,’ Tracy said, pointing at the sofa. ‘Dinner won’t be long.’

‘I’ll give you a hand,’ said Debbie.

The sofa was little more than a fat man’s armchair. Yvette perched on the edge of one cushion with her knees pressed together. Terry lounged on the other with his arms straddling the backrest. His knee brushed against her thigh.

‘Tracy tells me you’ve just arrived in Australia.’

‘I was living in Malta.’

‘Named after the cross?’

They both laughed.

‘It would be the other way round.’

‘Er Malta? My geography is failing me.’

She could hardly believe his ignorance.

‘Malta is about a hundred kilometres off the coast of Sicily,’ she said, wondering at once if he even knew the whereabouts of that island. Perhaps the mention of Italy might have been more helpful. She was instantly wistful, recalling the ancient cities, the honey-coloured stone, the turquoise of the sea. She pictured Carlos’ house, the flat roof, the old stone walls and shuttered windows. And she yearned for Malta, the rugged landscape, the uninhibited freedom of her life there.

‘What were you doing there?’

What to say? Artist? Too vague. Mafia mole? – Too exotic.

‘Market trader. I sold my hand-made jewellery.’ Multi-coloured necklaces and earrings made from plaited thread. She thought of the pursuit, even at the time, as her hippy phase and no doubt her response conjured in Terry’s mind an image of a barefooted nymphette with braided hair found in abundance in Kuta. Still, the handicraft sold well. And he seemed satisfied.  ‘And you?’ she added, keen to steer the conversation away from her.

‘I’m an artist. A leather sculptor.’

‘Fascinating,’ she said with enthusiasm, privately regretting she’d chosen to portray herself in such a common-place if exotic fashion.

‘You have to see his work, Yvette,’ Tracy said, handing her a glass of red wine. ‘He’s a genius.’

A genius? Yvette stifled a smile. She couldn’t imagine anyone living in this sleepy backwater as anything other than a hick.

Tracy passed round hunks of bread and plates of bean stew. Then she raised her glass with a, ‘Cheers,’ and slugged her wine before sitting down with Debbie on the opposite sofa. The others reached for their glasses in reply.

Tracy and Debbie engaged in small talk as they nibbled through their food. Terry ate with gusto. Yvette forked from the edges of the mound on her plate, no longer hungry. Terry’s presence was making her oddly nervous. He had an allure about him yet she wasn’t sure she found him all that attractive. He wasn’t her type. Surely he couldn’t be the fulfilment of the palm-reader’s prophecy. Besides, she thought, glancing at her sister, you can’t force fate.

Leaving Tracy and Debbie to the dishes, she followed Terry outside. The air was still and crisp. She gazed at the stars in the sharp, moonless vault of sky, struck by the luminosity and the depth of black, the void.

Terry was rolling a cigarette. ‘Tracy tells me you came here on a holiday visa.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you’re planning to stay?’

‘I’m going to try.’

‘Good luck,’ he said, doubtfully.

‘Yeah, thanks.’

‘Lucky you came by plane.’

She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

He took a drag on his cigarette and inhaled, deeply. ‘If you’d come by boat you’d be in detention on some mosquito-infested island, sweating it out for months if not years.’

An image of the capsized boat flashed into her mind. ‘I’m not a refugee,’ she said, coolly.

‘No. Of course not.’

They stood together in the silence, broken only by the forceful exhale of his smoke-infused breath. Then by a rustle coming from a pile of old timber stacked beside a shed. In the darkness she made out the shadowy figure of a cat slinking towards a copse of trees. She looked back at Terry whose face was tilted heavenwards. Aware of her gaze, he smiled, and with the heel of his shoe he stubbed out his cigarette on a patch of bare earth.

‘Would you like to see my studio?’ he said, casually.

‘Sounds great.’

‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’

He didn’t ask for her number.

 

1.6

 

One blustery morning in the following week, Yvette drove to the coast in her mother’s station wagon. She was due at Terry’s studio at eleven. It was a pleasant drive through a picturesque landscape, the mountain always to her left, wattle trees dotted here and there in full bloom, but she couldn’t admire it. Running through her mind in a replay loop was the knowledge that Debbie and her mother had colluded and Tracy had been in on the whole thing. The situation was a sham and she could scarcely believe she was going through with it.

When she reached Bermagui she was a welter of emotion. Once an isolated fishing village sheltering in a deep bay guarded by the mountain to the north, the town had become a desirable tourist and early-retirement destination, particularly for those wealthy enough to own a boat. Yvette drove across a long bridge, glimpsing a pelican crouched on a post at the edge of the choppy waters of the lagoon. She passed the yachts nestling in the marina, the sandwich boards stacked like dominoes near a polling station displaying the smiling faces of wanna-be and soon-to-be has-been Federal politicians vying for power with vacuous promises feeling pleased she couldn’t vote, and, as she neared Terry’s studio, squat on a low rise, a row of shops housed in plain concrete buildings with garish facades that mocked the mountain, the shimmering ocean and the creamy sands of the bay. Main Street, pandering to the battery of holidaymakers, whale watchers, nature lovers and sports fishermen, who occupied the town through the summer. Across the road, beneath the shade of palms and sturdy Norfolk Pines, play equipment, benches, picnic tables and a toilet block were scattered along a tongue of lawn separated from the beach by a narrow strip of dunes. Now the park was empty. No children scampering about, whizzing back and forth on swings or hanging upside-down on monkey bars, no dogs sniffing and straining on leads, no parents pushing strollers, slathering their young in sunscreen or spreading out blankets in the shade. Even the seagulls, starved of unwanted chips, had flown back out to sea.

Terry’s studio was in a café at the end of the parade of shops, situated between a motel and a hairdressing salon. The café was closed for the season. He’d told Yvette to pull up in the car park at the far end of the lawn. She stuffed her sketch-book into her bag and opened the drivers-side door. One foot on the tarmac and a squall buffeted the car, threatening to slam the door on her thigh. She leaned her shoulder against the door and battled it ajar as she stood. Wanting to regain her composure, she walked to the dunes and stared at the waves walloping the shore, grateful for the breadth of golden sand between her and that unbridled water.

Terry opened the café door before she knocked. He must have seen her arrive. He stood squarely in the doorway, blocking her entry. A heady mix of solvents and the rich smell of leather wafted outside. She was self-conscious and still filled with misgivings. A blast of wind pushed her forward and he took the opportunity to offer her a welcoming hug. ‘Hi,’ he said, and another part of her wanted to fall into his arms.

She followed him into a vestibule and through a set of glass doors. His studio took up about half the café’s eating area, a cavernous space with an industrial-grey floor, white-washed walls and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the ocean. Tables pushed against the walls were strewn end-to-end with leather in various shades of brown, from narrow strips to whole hides. Terry led her to his workbench, cluttered with scraps of leather and an array of hand tools.

‘I’ll just finish up,’ he said without apology.

She watched him cut a swatch of leather. He had an industrious manner about him, focused and serious. Even so, she wondered if his apparent busyness were not contrived.

‘How did you get into leather sculpting?’

‘I used to be a saddle maker before I attended the Canberra School of Art.’ He paused. ‘There I became inspired by the work of Rex Lingwood.’

‘Rex Lingwood?’

‘The master leather sculptor.’

Without looking up from his bench, he described at length the processes of working with leather, the wetting, moulding and stretching, gluing, carving and polishing. Then he wiped his hands on a rag and passed her an arty magazine folded open at a review of leather sculpting.

She scanned the article then wandered around the room. A stack of large squares of plywood leaned against a wall. A few half-finished pieces that didn’t draw her in. Then she noticed a finished piece leaning against the far wall. Mounted on a large rectangle of black-painted plywood was the three-dimensional form of a winged human torso. She was genuinely impressed. ‘Wow!’ she said, loudly.

Terry looked up. ‘It’s for a gallery in Sydney.’

‘It’s extraordinary.’

‘It’s Eros.’

‘The god of sexual desire.’

‘The god of passion.’

Terry’s artistic mastery unexpectedly stabbed at her own creativity. Cast in his light, she had little ambition. The jewellery she made in Malta didn’t qualify. And her incomplete sketches of the dead and limbless tree in the neighbour’s paddock weren’t even dabbling. She felt like a dilettante. She hadn’t done more than dangle a pencil nib in artistic waters since she’d arrived in Australia. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to. She’d lost her passion, her creativity shrivelled like a prune. She was a directionless fool. She wondered if in her, the light of Eros shone dimly. But that couldn’t be true. Her passion for Carlos was intense.

Terry grabbed his leather satchel and car keys. ‘Sorry about that. Now, I’m all yours.’

She was silent. She hadn’t a clue what to say to him.

‘Would you like to come back to my place?’

She hesitated. ‘I’ll have to let my mother know when I’ll be back.’

‘You are an adult, Yvette.’

‘She’ll worry.’

Terry and a male friend shared an A-frame cottage built on a steep slope on the outskirts of town. She walked up a wooden staircase to the front door. Terry followed close behind. The northern side of the house was elevated, with a veranda looking out at tall gum trees. Inside, an open-plan living area led on to the bedrooms.

 

1.7

 

On the days she wasn’t cleaning motel rooms she drove to Terry’s studio. After that first visit she left her sketch book behind. Without it she was idle and listless. She watched Terry work. She sat on the end of a table and swung her legs. She flicked through his arty magazines until boredom drove her outside to wander about in the park and on the beach, kicking sand and collecting shells. Sometimes she stood at the waterline in awe of the heaving plain of sapphire, the crash and the quick suck of the waves. When she felt brave she dipped her toes in the spume.

At lunchtime she went down the street to the bakery for two meat pies. Terry loved meat pies. She didn’t. She slipped into the supermarket for fruit.

She’d become curiously attached to her waif-like figure. She found her size empowering. Terry liked her thin too, but for an altogether different reason. He said her shape was perfect. He would cup his hands over her breasts murmuring in her ear that more than a handful was a waste. He would squeeze her buttocks, smooth his palms across her flat tummy and circle her wrist with his thumb and forefinger. When he whispered he loved her, she was sure he only meant her body.

Which explains why with Terry she didn’t enjoy sex. It couldn’t be because he smelled of meat pies. She wasn’t that fickle. And there could be no other reason for her lack of desire for him. He had a great physique. He was bright, witty and chatty. And his love was a salve for her wounded heart. But she didn’t connect with him. Her body was numb. Terry had no idea. She pretended to respond. She groaned over his caresses. She threw her head back and gasped to convince him that he satisfied her, every time.

And she lied when she told him that she loved him.

 

Terry owned a forty-acre bush block in the foothills of a nearby mountain. One warm spring day when the wind was still, he suggested Yvette might like to take a look. Ten minutes into the trip she’d lost confidence in Australian driving standards. Whoever had granted Terry a licence was either unimaginably lax or nuts. Terry spent more time looking at her than the road. He drove too fast. He held the steering wheel at six o’clock with his left hand, over-steering and veering first towards the hard shoulder and then, bumping over cat’s eyes, to the wrong side of the highway. Seeing her grip her seat he patted her thigh and said, ‘Trust me. I haven’t trashed a car yet.’

Yet?

Leaving the highway, he headed up a dirt road that wound through the gullies and spurs of the mountain. Terry jerked his way round potholes, skidded over corrugations and charged along on the wrong side of the road. When he lurched into a bend and fish tailed out the other side, she gasped.

Terry laughed. ‘You’re safe.’

She didn’t feel the slightest bit safe. She might be a risk taker but this was not the sort of risk she had in mind.

They pulled up in a small clearing beside a roofless mud-brick hut. Before she opened the passenger-side door she wiped the sweat from her palms. She felt like a marionette with its strings caught in a fan.

Terry took her hand and led her onto a rustic wooden deck. She poked her head through one of the window cavities. There were no interior walls. The floor was a crisscross of bearers and joists.

‘What do you think?’ he said, grinning.

She was dumbfounded. Mustering enthusiasm she said, ‘Awesome,’ privately hoping this wasn’t leading where she thought.

She withdrew her head and looked around. The place was spooky. The forest of gum trees overshadowed the house, their writhen branches bearing down like witch’s fingers.

‘I dreamt about you last night,’ Terry said. ‘You were standing right here in a long red dress like a fairy-tale princess. I stood beside you holding your hand.’

She felt a ripple of alarm mingled with disbelief. Debbie’s dream was almost identical. ‘How romantic,’ she said, masking her unease.

‘I’ll be your handsome prince.’ He lifted her face to his. ‘And marry you.’

She didn’t answer. They’d only known each other a few weeks.

‘You’re vulnerable,’ he went on. ‘You need someone to protect you.’

What gave him that idea? He hadn’t fallen in love with her. He was enamoured with a babe-in-the-woods fantasy. The knight on a steed set to rescue the distressed damsel. She’d be an extension of his ego. It was madness. But she felt herself yielding. He was a nice man, a good man, proud but sincere. He’d never hurt her in the way Carlos had. Could she force herself to love a man she had no feelings for?

 

Back at home Yvette sat with her arms folded tightly across her chest, hands gripping flesh. She stared out the window at the mountains in the distance, furious that her mother and sister had colluded to influence her life. They had no right to interfere. The root of her reasoning was the loss of her unborn child. She wanted desperately to replace the baby she aborted, was urged to abort, by Carlos. And she would never risk having Terry’s child. He’d told her he dumped his last girlfriend because her post-childbirth stomach was not to his liking. She’d had a caesarean. He said he couldn’t fancy a woman unless her stomach was pancake-flat. What sort of man thinks that? – Surely not the fulfilment of the palm-reader’s prophecy. She draped a protective arm across her tummy and resolved to bring the relationship, and the conniving, to an end.

 

1.8

 

Without Terry in her life she was restless again. She couldn’t countenance a whole summer cleaning motel rooms. One afternoon, she was sitting on the floor trying not to engage with Days of Our Lives when her phone rang. It was Thomas, her friend from London who’d moved to Perth in July to be with his boyfriend. She’d met Thomas at a Noah and the Whale concert in Notting Hill six years earlier. It was her final year of her Masters. After the support band had left the stage and they were waiting for the main act they struck up a conversation about David Hockney.  Thomas had that day browsed the artist’s works at the Tate. He seemed eccentric yet kind and they’d remained friends ever since.

After catching up on his new life down under, she was reticent and vague when he asked her where she was.

‘Australia? I thought you were in Bali.’

‘Long story. I finished with Carlos. I’m here on a holiday visa.’ She went on to explain her circumstances as succinctly as she could and excluding the abortion.

‘But you’re an Aussie. Dual citizenship or something.’

‘Afraid not.’

‘A holiday visa? You’ll have one hell of a job gaining residency.’

‘I know.’

‘You’ll have to find someone to marry.’

‘Not you as well. That’s what my mother is saying.’

‘She’s right. It’s common knowledge.’ He paused. ‘So where exactly are you, geographically speaking.’

‘New South Wales.’

‘Well, fancy that! We’re neighbours.’

‘Hardly,’ she said, wondering if he even knew where New South Wales was.

‘We could be.’ He told her he’d just purchased a one-bedroom unit in a suburb close to the city centre.

‘I’d love to visit. The farm is, well…’ she glanced at her mother to make sure she wasn’t listening. She wasn’t. ‘Intolerably dull.’

‘Why don’t you move here?’

‘To Perth?’

‘You can stay in my old flat until the lease runs out.’

After ten years apart, did she really want to sever her relationship with her mother again by putting the width of the continent between them? The only other comment the palm reader had made was that Yvette would do better far from her family. Yvette had dismissed the remark at the time but after recent events, she couldn’t agree more.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘When shall I come?’

‘As soon as you like.’

She waited for the credits to roll and Leah had disappeared outside before she switched on Leah’s computer and researched the cheapest route. She booked the bus to Melbourne and a one-way plane ticket to Perth. She left in four days. A quick check of her inbox – there was nothing but junk – then she went outside and wandered around the garden, finding her mother picking broad beans.

‘Mum.’

‘Yes?’ Her mother didn’t look up.

‘I’m moving to Perth.’

Leah shoed away a curious bee with a soft flick of her hand, then carried on picking beans. ‘Perth?’ she said. ‘Why Perth?’

Yvette explained as the colander filled with bean pods.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I can’t stay here, Mum.’

‘You’re not happy, that’s obvious.’

‘I’ll miss you.’

‘I’ll miss you.’

‘At least it’s not half way round the world this time.’

‘Just a whole continent.’

‘You can visit.’

‘Well, good luck.’

She trailed her mother inside and helped shell the beans, wondering if she could ever face coming back to this sleepy, isolated backwater where her family, for a reason that remained inexplicable, had chosen to play out their miniscule lives.

 

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: abortion, asylum, asylum seekers, boat people, free novel, illegals

Asylum

 

 

”Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Carl Gustav Jung

 

 

 

Synopsis

Seeking asylum from the wreckage of her life, art-school graduate Yvette Grimm arrives in Australia on a holiday visa, re-uniting with her English-born mother, Leah. Yvette applies for permanent residency with no hope of success. She resists Leah’s advice that she marry to stay in the country, investing her hopes in a palm-reader’s prophecy that she would meet the father of her children before she’s thirty. She’s twenty-nine.

Set in the excoriating heat of an endless Perth summer, Yvette enters a Gothic world filled with actors and dilettantes. Life is surreal. A cockroach infestation in her drab flat leads to an unexpected revelation; her childhood friend Heather appears in a café and before long she’s singing in a choir; and an encounter with Gordon, a former resident of a children’s home, fosters a new artistic direction.

The prophecy proves easy to fulfill. Three liaisons and there’s a triptych of possible fathers.  Yvette struggles not to feel cheap. When she discovers she’s having twins her tribulations worsen, the deportation order she’s been anticipating triggering the premature birth of her twins.

 

PART ONE
 1.1

Dents in the loop-pile carpet marked the legs of once-present furniture. The walls, bare, rendered an insipid peach. There was a faint smell of acrylic paint. Shutting herself in, she closed the bedroom door behind her, the slap-back echoes jeering, a clamour of recriminating voices.

She would never be enamoured with shoulds.

It was a shrine in here. A room for storing the past. A box of a room, smaller then with all the clutter. When Yvette was last here, a teak-veneer wardrobe and a white melamine chest of drawers took up one wall. A single bed occupied the full length of the other. Hanging above the bed was a whimsical print of a young girl in a shabby brown dress, standing in a cobbled street beneath an industrial-grey sky, walled in to either side by flat-faced Victorian terraced houses receding to a point behind her. That print hung in all of her childhood bedrooms. The chest of drawers was crowded with artefacts. The gaudy vase she bought for her mother’s birthday one year. The pink jewellery box with the plastic ballerina that still twirled shakily to Fur Elise when she opened the lid. A contended Snoopy lying atop his money-box kennel. The generous-faced alarm clock her mother gave her when she was ten and she wound so tightly it never ticked again and has stayed stuck between eight and nine ever since. Yvette had been too ashamed to tell her.

A blade of sunlight slicing through the beige fabric bars reflected in the mirror on the opposite wall and stung her eyes. She hefted herself out of bed and swished the blind aside.

The awning window faced northeast, protected from the intense sun of summer by the foliage of a silver birch. Yvette was in no doubt her mother had lined up the angles to make sure. The crisp light of early morning shone through the branches, now wintry bare, making a filigree pattern on the frost-burnt grass. Two parrots, bright and keen, preened on one of the lower limbs. The birch was set in a neat garden of clipped lawn and rose beds. Dotted here and there were grevilleas and bottle brushes, all neat and trim. Her mother had a fondness for reds, stately reds, traditional and rich. There ought to be topiary. Box hedges and cascades of wisteria. And white picket fences. Instead the garden was hemmed by barbed wire strung between red-gum posts, electrified to keep out the cattle. Beyond, there was a backdrop of undulating paddocks peppered with majestic red gums. The entire valley embraced by an armchair of forested mountains. Bucolic paradise, worthy of the brushstrokes of Alfred Sisley.

The air was calm. Dew glistened on a spider web hanging under the veranda. A kookaburra’s cackling crescendo burst into the silence.

Forcing herself into the day, she pulled a baggy red jumper over her head and slipped on the size-eight jeans she used to wear as a teenager. She could scarcely believe her mother had kept her old clothes. But she was grateful. She owned nothing but the handful of sarongs and summer dresses she’d squashed into her cobalt-blue travelling bag when she left Malta, rugged and dry, for the moist and fecund Bali. The same cobalt-blue travelling bag she used to move her things into Carlos’ house. Her beloved Carlos. She couldn’t bear to look at the bag. She’d shoved it behind some shoe boxes in the bottom of the wardrobe the moment she arrived.

Where was he now? Still in Bali?  Heading back to Malta? – No doubt coveting the backside of every stewardess on the flight.

She sat down on the edge of the bed without feeling the grip of her jeans against her belly. Weren’t these the pair she used to zip up with the hook of a coat hanger? She was thin, a waif, sure to wander hither and yon, pulling her heart behind her like a clobbered plastic duck on squeaky wooden wheels.

Hearing a clatter of plates, she closed the door on her discontents and headed to the kitchen.

Her mother’s presence permeated the whole of this open-plan hardiplank kit-home. She was in the three-piece suite, the hearth rug and the pine dining table, so highly polished the reflection of the morning sun dazzled as Yvette walked by. She was in every framed print hanging on the walls, in every ornament and knick-knack, from the Spode plates, Wedgewood saucers and porcelain figurines right down to the glass rolling pin she kept in a kitchen drawer. Even the door mat had her footprint on it. In this house Yvette could only be her daughter, the prodigal returned after a ten year absence.

Her mother, Leah, was bending down to reach into the cupboard under the sink. Her buttocks bulged like buns in the seat of the dull-blue track pants she wore around the house. Hearing Yvette enter the kitchen, she turned and raised herself up to her full height, much shorter than Yvette recalled, and smiled before her gaze slid away. Leah had aged. Short curly hair, ten years earlier a mop of nutty brown, now thin and white. The freckles on her face had joined together, giving her fair skin a sandy patina. Her hazel eyes were still vigilant, yet softer, more resigned. There was a slight downturn to the mouth. Her face had lines, wrinkles and creases where once there were none. Yvette found it hard to accustom herself to the changes. And there was a sluggishness in the way her mother moved. Yvette remembered her energy, always darting about, not exactly agile, but deft. She felt remote. And was saddened by it. Too many years living intensely while her mother grew vegetables. Yvette was a stranger to her but she didn’t seem to know it.

Yvette grabbed a cereal bowl from the cupboard beside the cooker and opened the pantry door.

‘Tea?’ Yvette turned to see her mother pouring boiling water into a second cup. ‘We’ll fill out the immigration forms after breakfast,’ Leah said, heading out through the back door carrying an ice-cream container filled with vegetable scraps. Her mother was the most practical woman Yvette had ever known. She’d sent off for the permanent residency forms the moment Yvette told her she was coming.

She had to get out of Bali. She was too distressed to stay. So distressed that the travel agent in Kuta, a small and wizened man with a permanent and insanely broad grin, had driven her all over Denpasar on his scooter to help secure the holiday visa and the one-way ticket to Sydney.

Yvette went to the dining table with her breakfast, sitting with her back to the sun. She flicked through the form. She wanted to gain residency through the deadlocked back door. She thought she might be eligible under the family reunion category. She read through the instructions and found she wasn’t. Her father was still in England. She hadn’t seen him for years and had no intention of ever doing so, but he was a blood parent.

Her mother came back inside and joined her. Yvette passed her the form and watched her leaf through the pages, scrutinising the instructions, lips tightening. ‘Perhaps there’s a loophole,’ she murmured.

A loophole that benefits a refugee? In the Department of Immigration and Border Protection’s draconian rule system? Impossible. Besides, she could hardly claim that were she to return to Malta her life would be in danger. That when Carlos reached across that restaurant table in Bali and pulled her hair, his fit of frustration constituted an act of persecution or torture. Yvette was seeking refuge from the wreckage of her life.

Leah leafed again through the pages. ‘There might be compassionate grounds.’

‘Mum, I don’t…’ She stopped speaking. They both knew there wasn’t a skerrick of compassion in DIBP’s institutional bones.

She drained her cup and took her breakfast things back to the kitchen then wandered across the living-room and gazed out the window. A long lock of mist drifted in the valley, slipping through a stand of red gums.

Leah was watching her closely. ‘You’ll have to get married,’ she said, matter-of-factly, as if in the time it had taken Yvette to walk to the kitchen and back she’d conceived the solution.

‘Married?’

‘It’s the only way.’

‘I couldn’t,’ she said emphatically, shocked that her mother would even consider the thought. It wasn’t the deception that bothered her. There was a part of her, the romantic and the fool, adamant that marriage had to be a contract founded on love, not convenience.

Without another word Yvette filled out the form and slid it into an envelope along with a vague hope of a miracle and the relevant photocopied pages of her British passport – the holiday visa, the page with the photo of her face with its wooden grin and harried brown eyes. She knew she was far prettier than that.

It would be months before she heard the outcome. Meanwhile she needed a job. For that, Leah told her, she needed a tax file number. Even for the most menial of casual work.

‘The Post Office will have the form,’ she said. ‘I’ll I run you into town?’

‘I’ll walk.’

She stuffed the envelope in her pocket and went outside. The air was fresh, the morning bright. Taking up one of the plastic chairs beside the wood pile, she shuffled her feet into a pair of Leah’s old volleys and tightly tied the laces to compensate for her size feet. Leah was a nine, Yvette an eight. Her mother’s cat rubbed against her calf. She ruffled her hand through its fur. The cat followed her to the fence then lost interest and prowled back to the house.

She closed the gate behind the garden, picked her way through the paddock, avoiding the spats of cow manure and crossed the cattle grid. The farm straddled the lower reaches of gullied hills some two kilometres north of Cobargo. Heading for the highway, she walked up the dirt track that snaked through a neighbour’s property. His paddocks were denuded. Dead trees, ghostly-white, their contorted limbs stretching heavenward, stood like monuments to the forest pre-dating the squatters. The only surviving trees were the apple gums growing on batholithic hillcrests. Their roots smothered in middens of cow dung heaped by generations of paddock-clearing farmers.

Leaving the paddocks behind, she followed a dirt road flanking a hillside of bush to a T-junction. Directly across the highway, in a swathe of mown grass, the cemetery displayed the gravestones of the departed to every vehicle travelling up and down this remote stretch of road. Somewhere among the gathering of Catholic graves lay her step-father.

She turned right and headed down to the village huddling at the bottom of the valley, a quaint gathering of gifts shops and cafes housed in historic weatherboard and brick buildings. She crossed the road at the newsagency and passed the art gallery, formerly a petrol station. On the forecourt, in the shade of a deep awning, an elaborate sculpture spilling from an old iron wheel rim sat beside two defunct petrol bowsers. Ahead, on the other side of the silted and willow-choked creek, was the hotel, a brick and tile boozer no doubt frequented by she’ll-be-right-mate beery blokes and their whisky-and-coke drinking sheilas. Flanking the road that wound west to the hinterland of dairy farms and wilderness were the Catholic Church, the primary school and the dirt track to her sister’s farm. The Anglican Church stared piously from its equally lofty location to the east. The village, with a history entrenched in milking cows, remained as self-sufficient as ever it was, supplying the needs of man and beast. There was a doctor, a vet, a police station and even a swimming pool. The few back streets contained a smattering of vintage weatherboard cottages and contemporary brick and hardi-plank houses interspersed with vacant blocks. The village hadn’t changed an iota since she was last here. The butcher, baker, supermarket and post office were exactly as she remembered them. The sweeping views that surrounded the village failed to inspire her. They might as well have been murals plastered to her mother’s living-room walls.

The year the twin towers fell and the war on terror declared, her mother had once again upped for a better life in this land of plenty, settling here with Yvette’s step-father and sister, Debbie, the moment they arrived in Australia, foregoing all the opportunities that Sydney might afford for a pastoral dream. Not a tree-change, they’re too conventional for alternatives. They felled the remaining red gums on their hundred-acre block before Yvette followed, and six weeks later, left, before her step-father, Joe, a robust gung-ho sort of man with a penchant for guzzling lager, lost his life to a chain saw. Leah and Joe hadn’t been together long. A sudden and gruesome accident, the sort of tragedy that rips into all that is soft and vulnerable. But her mother was a tight-lipped woman; her letters never mentioned her grief. With Yvette back in England she turned to the only family she had here, Debbie.

When Yvette last saw Debbie she was a smug sixteen-year old proud to be engaged to a local boy. She had her own story, distinct from Yvette’s as cotton wool and splinters, a cushiony narrative of stability and marital harmony. Now Yvette couldn’t walk down the main street of the village without being identified as Debbie’s sister. The moment she entered the post office a buxom woman, squeezing past on her way outside, looked her up and down and said, ‘Are you Debbie’s sister?’

‘That’s me,’ she said with a forced smile, thinking, no actually, she’s my sister since I was born first. Even as the words ran through her mind she felt contrite. Resentment isn’t becoming. Yet the people around here hadn’t a clue who she was. And she wasn’t about to tell them. Only she didn’t want to be defined as her mother’s daughter or her sister’s sister, aligned with the secretary of the agricultural show society and the dairy farmer’s wife.

Her mother was working on next year’s show when she returned. Notepads, forms, old programs, a cash box and raffle tickets were spread across the dining table. Yvette sat in the chair furthest from her and read through the identification requirements on the tax-file-number form. Bank account, driver’s licence and Medicare card, none could be acquired without showing her immigration status.

‘It’s no good Mum,’ she said, dropping the form on the table and leaning back in her seat. ‘I can’t get one.’

Her mother peered over the rim of her glasses. ‘I thought not.’ She put down her pen and folded her arms under her bosom. ‘We should have become citizens before we went back to England.’

‘You weren’t to know.’

‘At the time I never thought I’d come back. I’d had enough. I spent that last year cleaning the corridors and classrooms of your old primary school.’

‘And I caught the high school bus.’

It was the year Alanis Morissette vied with Celine Dion for first place in the charts. On that bus Yvette must have listened to Ironic and Because You Loved Me twice a day for months. Even then she preferred satire to sentimentality.

That first year of high school was fabulous. There were sleepovers at her best friend Heather McAllister’s place. Fun in the park across the street. The orange tree beside the house, laden with the juiciest, sweetest fruit. She had the best year. Her mother had her worst.

It was her mother’s decision to emigrate, both times. The first was in ’87. Leah wanted to leave the London of working-class council-housing estates. Common-as-muck, she’d say. Leah had left school at sixteen to spend a few months skivvying as an office junior before moving on to work in a cinema kiosk and a shoe shop, then becoming a traffic warden, a career that appealed to her because she worked outdoors and alone, unmolested by bitchy co-workers, creepy patrons and dithering customers with smelly feet. Yvette’s father, Jimmy, was a skilled factory worker. He was born a Cockney, his family relocated to South London during the post-war slum clearances. Leah wanted to better Jimmy. She thought Australia held the promise of a better life for her. That’s what the brochures told her. So she filled out the forms and flew them to Australia.

Leah’s best friend at primary school, Gloria, had emigrated with her family as ten-pound Poms twenty years before. Gloria had written to Leah regularly ever since. One of a small store of Grimm-family vignettes was how fortunate they’d been to avoid the Nissen huts of Graylands. Poor Gloria – that was what her mother called her friend – had gone from a three-bedroom terraced house in London to bunk beds in a migrant hostel in Perth. Leah thought the conditions scandalous. The hut had unlined corrugated-iron walls and bare wooden floorboards. And Gloria’s family had to share communal dining and communal ablutions with all the other migrants from Europe and the Middle East. Pentonville, Leah called it. Pentonville. For years Yvette thought her mother meant one of the pale-blue set in Monopoly. Leah was referring to the jail. You could stay there for months, a voluntary sentence, but a week had been enough for Gloria’s mum.

It was Gloria who’d arranged the three-bedroom rental in Kwinana and suggested Jimmy apply for a position at the aluminium refinery. Then Leah went on to buy a brick and tile home in Perth’s English-migrant capital, Rockingham.

Eight years later, Leah was ready to move back to London. Australia didn’t fulfil her expectations. She couldn’t find satisfying work. She wasn’t happy. She wasn’t happy with Yvette’s father.

Back in London Leah returned to her preferred career of traffic warden, much to Yvette’s teenage consternation. While Yvette chewed the ends of her Biros in class, her mother’s life was unfolding apace. Leah Grimm became Leah Betts. With a new husband in tow, she emigrated a second time. Yvette stayed behind, and stayed Grimm.

She couldn’t fathom why, when she was just eighteen, her mother chose to emigrate for a country where she found so little happiness the first time round.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Building bridges: asylum seekers in rural Australia

Just a little bit pleased to have published in e-journal On Line Opinion Building bridges: asylum seekers in rural Australia, reflecting on a recent home hospitality respite holiday for asylum seekers on bridging visas that I organised under the auspices of the Home Among the Gum Trees program run by Elaine Smith in Dandenong (Melbourne). Here are hosts Jon and Lou Oakes , who got involved in this project because they wanted to find out for themselves about refugees and provided the following feedback.

”There has been so much press about asylum seekers, but the human stories underneath hardly get a mention, and we really didn’t know what to expect when we met our young refugee family off the bus at Pambula,”  Jon said. ”Language was a major concern of course, but we needn’t have worried, as our guests had enough basic English for us to communicate the important stuff, and some things require no language at all – everyone is speechless when they first see Pambula rivermouth.”

”As an antidote to the look of incomprehension that sometimes arose during conversation, we both resorted to Google Translator, and while being mostly really helpful it also had some entertaining results, for example when one of our guests wanted a floor mop and the translator presented this in English as ‘salted peanuts’.  We’ve had a lot of laughs with our new friends, and have heard something of their story too.  They have lost everything in their journey to Australia, yet are so grateful to be here.”

”As migrants ourselves, we have a personal understanding of how it feels to be welcomed into Australia, the daily thankfulness that perhaps someone born here might not stop to think about.  Friends and businesses in the area have been very kind and helpful to our guests, just as they were to us when we were new arrivals.  Thanks to Bega Valley Rural Australians for Refugees we’ve had the chance to pass our welcome on to some lovely people we hope will become New Australians themselves one day.”

 When Jon asked Mal for his thoughts on the experience, Mal said, ”I like the visit because my wife and I we have found kind new friends, Mr Jon  and Mrs Lou.  The two weeks have been very good for me and my family, very loving and kind for us and our son.  I know I have found good friends  and our frienship will last a long time, I would like my new friends to come to my home too.” And his wife, Marni said, ”My husband and I and our  son came two weeks ago to see a new family for school holidays.  Two families with different languages and different cultures.  With our hosts we  visted their friends and family, and saw the beaches and beautiful parks and animals.  We had picnics with friends and cooked meals together.  I am an artist, we talked about painting and learned to understand more.  Our hosts gave us time and patience, we were happy all together.  Everything is new and very special to us, very nice area, nice people and very friendly.  In general, I thank everyone for everything.”

All of the asylum seekers and their hosts had an enriching time. Arranging these holidays has to be amongst the most rewarding forms of activism, profoundly affecting those involved and changing  lives. (names of asylum seekers have been changed)

Filed under: Uncategorized

Saying it with Flowers

 

 

  The Pope now reckons WWIII is already being fought in piecemeal fashion. Well spotted. I agree. It was always going to be fought in the Middle East.

Definition of a world war: A war involving many large nations.

I watched Anzac Girls last night (I fell asleep at the point when Uncle Sam saved the day which when I woke as the credits rolled I thought rather ironic).

Then I thought of where the battles of WWI were fought. I don’t like war and haven’t studied it so I’m hazy. But I suspect if you got some maps and superimposed the countries in battles fought now on top of those back then, you would have a similar geographical area. I understand for example that Iraq and Syria are quite big.

Ukraine is chunky too.

Gaza is a thin strip so we can’t always go by size. We must also factor in devastation.

We must also factor in genocide, ethnic cleansing and the displacement numbers.

Our WWIII is also a war on terror, which isn’t a war at all, but has somehow helped to create this other war.

The in-depth analysis I will leave to others.

I will say it with flowers.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: battles of WWI, WWIII

Heeding the Jihad Call

   Hearing Obama outline his latest plan for the curtailment of ISIS it would be easy to believe that this group emerged spontaneously and entirely of its own accord out of the desert country of Syria and Iraq, filling a vacuum in the power shenanigans left when the US military pulled out of Iraq. That’s the propaganda. That is what the US and its allies would have us believe. And it isn’t true.

An elite of concentrated power bent on expansionism, such as found in Empire America today, will inevitably spawn its nemesis; groups of the disenfranchised, the alienated or the diametrically opposed in belief and ideology, those who contest both the expansionism and the elitism behind it. This sounds a logical and reasonable claim.

Empire America calls the nemesis terrorism.

Dig around and things begin to look quite different. Since the power elite of Empire America knows full well that such a nemesis will emerge, as inevitable as sunrise, they have set off with fertilizer and a watering can, encouraging their nemesis to grow and flourish, seizing the opportunity to further their own aim to render the Middle East a series of Failed States.

The nemesis has had other names. In the age of European expansionism, when Spain and Portugal and Britain were conquering new lands, the nemesis was piracy. In fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries piracy was rife. Renegades from all over Europe flocked to Algiers and Sale, (the pirate utopias of North Africa),  many converting to Islam. Piracy was big and legitimate business. In Algiers, then the world’s slave capital and a sanctuary for a polyglot of renegades from all over Europe, ten per cent of the proceeds of a pirate attack went into the city coffers in exchange for the pirates’ protection. Sale, originally inhabited by Berbers and the only Moroccan Atlantic city not to have fallen to the rising powers of Spain and Portugal, became the home of exiled Spaniards that had fled King Phillip III’s anti-Moor ethnic cleansing. It was out of these exiled groups that the notorious Sally Rovers came into being. Ships sailing back from the Americas were especially vulnerable. The Canary Islands, situated en route to the Americas, were repeatedly sacked. And these piratical attacks were brutal. Whole villages and towns razed, people slaughtered, or taken as slaves to be sold back in Algiers. An entertaining and informative book on the matter is Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes,  by Peter Lamborn Wilson, 1995.

Today the ideology of Jihad has replaced that of piracy as a repository for all the thugs, criminals and blood-lusting psychopaths eager to let loose their base impulses. Young men craving adventure, keen to cut loose and go wild, enamoured with rampage, glorying in brutality are drawn to join one or other of the many groups fighting the enemy Empire America, fighting to gain supremacy over competing groups, fighting to impose their own version of Islam, fighting for the hell of it.

Then as now the holy war and its defeat are glamourised and revered. Tragedies mourned, heroes celebrated. Pomp and ceremony in abundance. Then as now it is big business that profits. Then as now it is the innocent who suffer.

Now, as then, the fall of ISIS will mirror the retreat of Empire. Or its collapse.

 

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: American empire, empire, ISIS, nature of humanity, Power, terrorist

On Air

 

   I’ll be on Ann Creber’s The Good Life this Monday (8th September) at 4.10 pm, talking about the home hospitality respite program for asylum seekers that I coordinate for the Bega Valley under the auspices of Home among the Gum Trees, Rural Australians for Refugees.

Tune in to 3MDR, 97.1FM or go to their website for live streaming.  http://www.3mdr.com/program/detail/6/The-Good-Life/

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: activism, asylum seekers, refugees

It’s unequivocal – Uranium is our salvation!

   It pleases me to announce that Australia will be selling uranium to India. They are a stable democracy with a growing economy and much need for power. This government is happy to expand into the vibrant market of India with this valuable resource, giving a timely boost to our own economy. Our nation stands to gain many benefits from this gesture of goodwill. Profits all round. It’s a win win win. Yes, I’ll chink flutes with you.

Tailing ponds? Oh, don’t worry about them. They are perfectly safe. Deformities in local populations? You mustn’t take notice of the propaganda on this one. There is no evidence whatsoever that any deformities, if they exist, were caused by the uranium mines, mills or tailing ponds. I shouldn’t pay much attention to the ABC (chuckle). Nuclear power is a safe industry. Fukushima? That was a freak accident and the authorities are doing a good job, a good job securing the plant. Nuclear power is the way of the future, a clean green technology empowering generations to come. Waste? I understand that the Indian nuclear power companies have a sound policy for securing their waste. Nuclear weapons and depleted uranium? Our uranium is sold for sole use in nuclear power stations and not for military use and I have it on good authority that the Indian government is working closely with the power industry to ensure that no uranium and no nuclear waste falls into the wrong hands.

Expanding the uranium mining industry in Australia is good for jobs and good for business. And make no mistake here, mining uranium is perfectly safe. What about adverse effects found in impact studies on World Heritage ecosystems and landscapes? There is absolutely no proof of this. Stringent environmental measures are in place. This government takes environmental safety matters very seriously.

I think we are all agreed on this. Bob Hawke has come out in support of our indigenous Australians accepting the storing of nuclear waste on their land. He’s right when he says it will  close the gap  on disadvantage. Clearly this is not a partisan issue.

No.

It’s a cast iron mindset.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: government, nuclear power, Power, uranium mining

Mauritania and curly haired dudes from Harvard

  I woke this morning with Mauritania on my mind. I heard the nation mentioned yesterday and realised I had forgotten where in Africa it was located. I was shocked at this, normally priding myself on knowing more or less where every nation in the world is. I am also motivated in reaction to some neatly curly haired Harvard scholar waxing on the telly last night about how the world is way more peaceful today than it ever has been, that killings are down, down, down and the only reason we may think otherwise is that we are overly influenced by crisis-focused news bulletins. The chap cited his statistics but I remain doubtful. I am always doubtful about statistics. Data collection is a precarious research method, there are always limiting criteria, much that is left out, and many ways that data can be manipulated. I always ask how such research is funded and in whose interests in serves. I listened to this expert’s slick presentation of his findings, my attention fixed on his too-neatly curly hair. Besides, I thought, even if true, his argument leaves out other issues, tons of them, from the rise of slavery and quasi-slavery on a global scale (Mauritania was the last country in the world to abolish slavery, apparently), ethnic cleansing (with millions displaced and in border camps – I don’t know what this Harvard dude did with this information), environmental decimation of epic proportions and so on.

So, back to Mauritania. Who in Australia gives a rat’s arse about Mauritania? Who even knows where the place is? It is easy enough to find out. Search Mauritania and News and much is revealed. Today I found the All Africa website and headline news for Mauritania reads Harnessing the Country’s Natural Resources to Promote Economic Growth and Sustainable Development  by the World Bank. The article reads like Big Brother telling a wayward scamp how to live his life. The usual neoliberalism underpinning every paragraph, where concepts such as ”inclusive” and ”sustainable” must be interpreted in terms of their neoliberal hollowed-out meanings. I am still no closer to finding out what life is like in that desert land so I went to the Guardian website and found an article a year old on the enduring issue of slavery. Slavery is a living death. 

Why bother taking a short detour to ponder the lives of those living in Mauritania? Maybe to contest slick curly-haired dudes from Harvard whose claims serve the interests of obfuscation not reality.

If anyone happens to be curious about Mauritania, the CIA fact book is a good place to start. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/mr.html

 

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: globalisation, neoliberalism, slavery, World Bank