I wonder if there is anyone I can tell our story who will be able to tell me the ending. I thought, once, that I had seen the full stop on the very last line, but I allowed it to be an ... and now there is a second chapter to a book I am not enjoying reading.
I love the shape of your hands and the feel of your hair between my fingers, your bubbling floor. I miss the pictures of the clouds and the feeling of you pushing against the walls I put up. I miss your voice and being able to hear that song without wanting to tear off my own ears. I think about you all the time, think about you all the time.
There is nobody here. A friend tells me she is afraid that you will do me real damage. There’s nobody left that does not know the break in me with your name on it.
If it is not her, it will be somebody. I am so afraid.
I saw it there that day in your eyes. I am nothing and nobody to you.
141010
I dream of a black cat, and then see one in a front yard. I have a nightmare about her, and there she is, her ponytail swinging, walking your dog down the street. I awkwardly wait for you on the street, and I don't know where to put my hands.
You were so much to throw away, I never realised how much I was throwing away, when I let myself be so cruel.
You were so much to throw away, I never realised how much I was throwing away, when I let myself be so cruel.
A month ago, I did not see you.
I miss your musty old house, with its creaky boards. A month ago, I stood in a crowd of people, listening to one of the girls you approved of sing, and I didn't see you. There were surges of feet and jostling people, and I was looking at her illuminated face, and wondering where you were watching her from.
This is the way of things, isn't it? Brief meetings and caresses and then disappearances. I am not very good at it.
This is the way of things, isn't it? Brief meetings and caresses and then disappearances. I am not very good at it.
You were summer.
On one of the first hot days we went out. I was minding a friend’s house, a white house on a busy road, stamped with her pastel tastes. And we walked through quaint little streets together, brushing each other’s hands with our fingers. I lay on the couch, you sitting next to me, drinking vodka in sweating glasses, listening to the Go Betweens. You’d never heard them before. You came at me and I knew it would happen and yet I was surprised, and that tiny little stab of your tongue let me know who you were and what you wanted. And I yielded, yielded, yielded. We panted into each other’s mouths. And then you left me to think about it overnight. I tossed and turned and touched my bruised lips in a barely used bed all night. And the next night I yielded even more, despite knowing it wasn't right.
All of the heat of this long drawn out season I was giddy with the apple tartness, the alcohol bitterness of the fact that you were mine and not mine at all, inside me and not anywhere near me.
It’s still hot. But summer is fading. Today, I’m wearing that same summer skirt from that first day. I spent the morning with you, but there was nothing there, and I spoke of someone else whom I’ve been sleeping beside.
We are all dried up.
On one of the first hot days we went out. I was minding a friend’s house, a white house on a busy road, stamped with her pastel tastes. And we walked through quaint little streets together, brushing each other’s hands with our fingers. I lay on the couch, you sitting next to me, drinking vodka in sweating glasses, listening to the Go Betweens. You’d never heard them before. You came at me and I knew it would happen and yet I was surprised, and that tiny little stab of your tongue let me know who you were and what you wanted. And I yielded, yielded, yielded. We panted into each other’s mouths. And then you left me to think about it overnight. I tossed and turned and touched my bruised lips in a barely used bed all night. And the next night I yielded even more, despite knowing it wasn't right.
All of the heat of this long drawn out season I was giddy with the apple tartness, the alcohol bitterness of the fact that you were mine and not mine at all, inside me and not anywhere near me.
It’s still hot. But summer is fading. Today, I’m wearing that same summer skirt from that first day. I spent the morning with you, but there was nothing there, and I spoke of someone else whom I’ve been sleeping beside.
We are all dried up.
4.05 morning after
She is dizzy. Smells make her stomach heave. On her way home from work, in her pretty summer dress, she’s going to have to buy a package wrapped in crinkly clear plastic. She’ll open it up and read instructions on shiny white paper and she’ll follow them and the nervousness will fill her stomach with churning acidic liquid. She’ll see the liquid creep up into the plastic window and she’ll see one line or two, and these tiny lines will tell her what the next fourteen days will bring to her.
The man that she lay with, who was inside her with nothing between them, has silky hair. The inside of his mouth is as soft as his words are hard. I know this because I have lain with him too.
I once woke up with a man who took a phone call from a screaming woman. She knew where he was, who he was with, and did not want him to be there. I had been next to him and under him all night and there were naïve dreams of falling stars in my foggy mind. Our wetness was still between my legs. He turned away and took the call and did not again meet my eye. At that precise moment, something in my heart or my brain or my gut or my soul, or wherever these things live inside, shattered into little pieces of glass. Like the slithers of broken panes of glass that are impossible to sweep up, tiny dangerous little pieces that cut your feet but are invisible.
Since then, I have been an understudy. I have been waiting in the wings. I have been a woman in a fine silk dress hoping for the woman in the spotlight to fall and break the bones of a limb. I am the woman in an apartment in town with new silk stockings and pennyroyal tea in the cupboard.
I found out, one year and forty one days after that morning, that when she made that call she had a tiny curl of a thing inside her. There was a tiny life that was ended not long after.
I know the feeling of waking up in a hospital gown with the part of me that was growing, the part that made me so difficult and troublesome, removed so that I could continue pretending that I’d be pliable and easy to sleep next to. I know what it is to have the desire to just get.it.out suddenly overwhelmed by the grasping scraping rawness of waking up empty in a cold room.
When I think of these things, I see the dark tangled ribbons that join me to women who have not been lucky, have not been loved. I know that I will be hurt by these women and I will hurt them again, just as I know that the men around whom we circle will not be. We dance, like it is the beginning of May, flowers in our hair, each holding a ribbon, and we try to make the ribbons wrap in co-ordinated patterns around the may pole. But we trip each other up and end up tangled. Ribbons are knotted. We have to cut them to get free. We curse each other, again and again, edged frayed, less length in the silken cords every year.
The man that she lay with, who was inside her with nothing between them, has silky hair. The inside of his mouth is as soft as his words are hard. I know this because I have lain with him too.
I once woke up with a man who took a phone call from a screaming woman. She knew where he was, who he was with, and did not want him to be there. I had been next to him and under him all night and there were naïve dreams of falling stars in my foggy mind. Our wetness was still between my legs. He turned away and took the call and did not again meet my eye. At that precise moment, something in my heart or my brain or my gut or my soul, or wherever these things live inside, shattered into little pieces of glass. Like the slithers of broken panes of glass that are impossible to sweep up, tiny dangerous little pieces that cut your feet but are invisible.
Since then, I have been an understudy. I have been waiting in the wings. I have been a woman in a fine silk dress hoping for the woman in the spotlight to fall and break the bones of a limb. I am the woman in an apartment in town with new silk stockings and pennyroyal tea in the cupboard.
I found out, one year and forty one days after that morning, that when she made that call she had a tiny curl of a thing inside her. There was a tiny life that was ended not long after.
I know the feeling of waking up in a hospital gown with the part of me that was growing, the part that made me so difficult and troublesome, removed so that I could continue pretending that I’d be pliable and easy to sleep next to. I know what it is to have the desire to just get.it.out suddenly overwhelmed by the grasping scraping rawness of waking up empty in a cold room.
When I think of these things, I see the dark tangled ribbons that join me to women who have not been lucky, have not been loved. I know that I will be hurt by these women and I will hurt them again, just as I know that the men around whom we circle will not be. We dance, like it is the beginning of May, flowers in our hair, each holding a ribbon, and we try to make the ribbons wrap in co-ordinated patterns around the may pole. But we trip each other up and end up tangled. Ribbons are knotted. We have to cut them to get free. We curse each other, again and again, edged frayed, less length in the silken cords every year.
1988
The kitchen is long, narrow and repressively hot under a tin roof. Light is coming through the brown shutters, the child watches as dust particles become visible and disappear. The child’s Mother is frying the meat in the pan in her disapproving way. A fly is buzzing around, and the Mother keeps taking breaks from frying to swat at it with her tea towel with short, sharp violence. The sudden thwacks make everybody in the small room jump. On cheap plates, dinners are being piled. Lettuce, tomato, buns and fat, to be eaten with our hands. The child’s sister serves herself.
Tugging at my curls, standing in the corner, I’m watching her in her world that I wanted to be part of. She takes mayonnaise and tomato sauce, mixing it together in an orange paste like the colour she has dyed her hair. (Thwack, Mum’s towel flicks the bench) Mum says her hair now doesn’t look like the rest of ours. I will always remember that shade of orange made by her strange tastebuds, not like the colours of the lino covered floor or the lampshade. I think they were orange too, but they could have been blue, maybe green. That orange is so vivid in my memory.
She has a silver earring hanging from one ear, it was a bat, and as the pedestal fan tried to circulate air around the room, it softly flapped against her neck. (thwack). Her feet were bare, I remember because her toes seemed pointed as I looked down at them. I also like to think that her toes were painted red. I think she was humming, but I don’t really remember. I do remember that I once crept into her room when I couldn’t sleep. I laid my blanket on the floor of her cold room. In sleep, her face was so child like it could have been a mirror. I whispered her name. Wake up, I said, getting anxious. But she slept on.
In the kitchen, as she is getting her dinner, I am now clumsily following her. I spread orange paste on my bun too, even though I don’t enjoy the taste. (thwack) Mum makes me have the stuff on my burger that my sister calls rabbit food. I want to sneer at the food like she does, but everyone is shocked if I am rude. She sits on the vinyl chairs in the room, I remember them being brown and sticky. I am hot and my skirt is sticking to my knees. In my memory, she pays no attention to me as I stare at her, the curly haired child following the girl with dyed red hair. (thwack) Now I wonder, was she listening to something I said? Was the window in that room so big, and dark? Did the light overhead really swing like that, in the artificial breeze? (It’s a blackout. There’s nothing to cry about. Mum is with your little sister. She’s too little to be brave like us. We’re just going to light a candle, we don’t mind a bit of dark, do we? No need to cry)
As I chew my burger, trying to take bites as big as hers, she is apart from me. Her image is fuzzy. The little girl watches her, intent on the fast way in which she speaks, uses her hands, throws away words, and crams them into sentences where they probably don’t belong. If I remember correctly, nobody listened to her many words except me. My sister gets up to leave. Were there words spoken that were not her own, that made her leave at that moment? There were so many angry words spoken in our house, I can remember none specifically any more. What I remember now is only my own silence. On the way out, my sister draws a large heart on my child size black board.
For weeks afterwards, the curly haired child no longer let the neighbour’s children use the black board for games of teacher or hangman, alienating some of them forever. There was no way she would let that prefect white chalk heart be smudged away for a silly game.
As soon as the point of the heart is finished, she is gone. I remember waking up from a dream where a red haired girl danced away from me, and for the first time the outside light was switched off, casting my little room into unfamiliar darkness. For the first time, I knew if there was a blackout, I was on my own.
Tugging at my curls, standing in the corner, I’m watching her in her world that I wanted to be part of. She takes mayonnaise and tomato sauce, mixing it together in an orange paste like the colour she has dyed her hair. (Thwack, Mum’s towel flicks the bench) Mum says her hair now doesn’t look like the rest of ours. I will always remember that shade of orange made by her strange tastebuds, not like the colours of the lino covered floor or the lampshade. I think they were orange too, but they could have been blue, maybe green. That orange is so vivid in my memory.
She has a silver earring hanging from one ear, it was a bat, and as the pedestal fan tried to circulate air around the room, it softly flapped against her neck. (thwack). Her feet were bare, I remember because her toes seemed pointed as I looked down at them. I also like to think that her toes were painted red. I think she was humming, but I don’t really remember. I do remember that I once crept into her room when I couldn’t sleep. I laid my blanket on the floor of her cold room. In sleep, her face was so child like it could have been a mirror. I whispered her name. Wake up, I said, getting anxious. But she slept on.
In the kitchen, as she is getting her dinner, I am now clumsily following her. I spread orange paste on my bun too, even though I don’t enjoy the taste. (thwack) Mum makes me have the stuff on my burger that my sister calls rabbit food. I want to sneer at the food like she does, but everyone is shocked if I am rude. She sits on the vinyl chairs in the room, I remember them being brown and sticky. I am hot and my skirt is sticking to my knees. In my memory, she pays no attention to me as I stare at her, the curly haired child following the girl with dyed red hair. (thwack) Now I wonder, was she listening to something I said? Was the window in that room so big, and dark? Did the light overhead really swing like that, in the artificial breeze? (It’s a blackout. There’s nothing to cry about. Mum is with your little sister. She’s too little to be brave like us. We’re just going to light a candle, we don’t mind a bit of dark, do we? No need to cry)
As I chew my burger, trying to take bites as big as hers, she is apart from me. Her image is fuzzy. The little girl watches her, intent on the fast way in which she speaks, uses her hands, throws away words, and crams them into sentences where they probably don’t belong. If I remember correctly, nobody listened to her many words except me. My sister gets up to leave. Were there words spoken that were not her own, that made her leave at that moment? There were so many angry words spoken in our house, I can remember none specifically any more. What I remember now is only my own silence. On the way out, my sister draws a large heart on my child size black board.
For weeks afterwards, the curly haired child no longer let the neighbour’s children use the black board for games of teacher or hangman, alienating some of them forever. There was no way she would let that prefect white chalk heart be smudged away for a silly game.
As soon as the point of the heart is finished, she is gone. I remember waking up from a dream where a red haired girl danced away from me, and for the first time the outside light was switched off, casting my little room into unfamiliar darkness. For the first time, I knew if there was a blackout, I was on my own.
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