by Julie Holland
She washes up and puts away the knives, and dries ink on wet pages–looks out of the window at the alien sky–not a cloud. She knows every part of the benchtop. Where she neglected a hot pan. Where she scratched with a knife. Where the overwatered daisy died. Where escaping tears fell. To her, the benchtop is a map of tragedy. The dishwashing liquid is near empty, so she adds it to her list, in a notebook next to the beginnings of a poem. She’s a writer, not an author, because she’s not been published–yet–ever. She came at it late, at sixty, and from quite the wrong direction. She’s privileged. She knows this because she’s been told this, in the newspaper and on the radio, but she’s at an age where she can’t muster the bother with such transient things.
To prove she’s a writer, she reads Plath and Cohen and Vuong, but the complex poetry exceeds her comprehension. But she feels them, their words, like the resonance of guitar strings. It sustains her through her own migrant grief. She endures dark days when she lives defeated, but always wakes to read again, to speak her truth upon a blank page. Sometimes she slides into obsession over Winton, absorbing his words. She writes about Bottlebrush and Banksias, but this knowledge is a trap, a trope in her mouth. You see, his words are not hers.
And then she takes her first, tentative steps towards real creativity; a secret diary holding unpublishable thoughts. Thoughts about catching the immigrant blight, hush hush, it’s quiet, a whispering shamefulness. If you don’t love it, leave–isn’t that what they say? Displacement, a word she learns later, cloaks her in a cloud, shrouds her in shadow. It’s why she’s cold in summer heat, why she’s lost between cold days, and why the wind slices and the sun shears; as you can see, the weather in this dry land is not her friend.
If she could lose her northern accent, fit in more, stop saying ‘Eh-up, love,’ to total strangers; she’s sick of the question ‘Where you from?’ and practices ‘G’day, mate.’
Her mother is dead, and she writes about it in her notebook.
Mother prayed and knew nothing of Sunday hate, ate tinned salmon on Fridays, tapped segs into my soul. She taught me things that no longer matter, like how to light a good fire on a white frost morn, how to roast chestnuts on a shovel. I trammelled her, then abandoned her, to lock herself inside a kitchen world of baking buns and casseroles.
She feels unsettled by how their lives have paralleled; has she become her mother?
Karen, her friend, calls around for a cuppa. ‘Better be Yorkshire tea, don’t want that Bushels shite.’
Her hands shake as she drops teabags into mugs. The kettle takes ages. There’s no milk, so she rummages in the pantry for Long-Life. She doesn’t tell Karen. Karen only drinks fresh.
Karen asks, ‘How you coping?’
She doesn’t know, hasn’t allowed any of it to touch her. ‘I’m fine,’ she says.
‘Have you been out?’
‘No.’ She sips her tea.
‘Look, love, just hear me out.’ She knows what’s coming. ‘How long has it been since Brian died? Must be six months? And Kate’s married, and with Josh in Hong Kong, you’ve got to get out more. I’m having a barbecue, Saturday, it’ll be good, to get away from this.’ Karen’s referring to the chaotic bookshelves and the shambled desk. ‘Sitting on your own, reading this crap, it’s not natural.’ Karen’s always been a bully.
She lies, ‘I’ll come.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
‘And get your hair done, put on something nice. I’ve invited Bob from accounts.’
‘Great.’ She wishes Karen would piss off.
Karen sits back into the sofa cushions. ‘Got any biscuits, and not those shite Tim Tams, proper biscuits.’
She ends up joining Karen for an hour. They burn snags and throw on shrimp, cremate steaks with sizzle and flame, drink imported beer and warm wine. Karen makes a fuss of her. Not that she’s in Karen’s A team, you understand–and she suspects she’s not in the B team either– but still, needs must.
Karen asks her, ‘Going home this year?’
She hates it when Karen doesn’t listen. ‘I’ve got Mum’s funeral. Next week. Remember?’
‘Oh shit, sorry, forgot about that.’
‘I’ve got to sell the house.’
‘That’s right, you’re an only child. Must be like winning the lottery.’ Karen winks at Bob as she slops another piece of meat onto the grill and asks, ‘More shrimp, anyone?’
She wonders why she bothers with Karen.
Karen tells Bob she’s writing a bestseller (behind her back, Karen’s friends mock her, but she knows this). Karen says, ‘Like that J K woman.’
She tries to explain to Karen that it’s not that easy. That they want emerging voices, marginalised voices, facing the struggle head-on. She says women like her have had their say, that she’s part of the cliched invisible, the nameless. That old woman at number twenty-seven from wherever. That woman at the bar no one serves until she gets nasty, then everyone notices. She’s an old face in the mirror, unrecognisable, fatter but diminished. She says, ‘cut out the romance novels, where botoxed women age gracefully, or where women struggle in bad-marriage storylines, which do not represent me, and I am underrepresented.’
Karen and Bob look away, embarrassed by her outburst.
At home, she writes,
Stop speaking, you’re embarrassing your children. Old woman wearing over-bright lipstick, queuing in the supermarket. Collecting prescriptions from the doctor. Sitting alone in a café nursing a pot of tea. Homesickness that claws deeper each passing year, that has no cure but death. The doctor wants a hundred dollars to talk about it. Let me tell you, don’t waste your dollar. We’re old tits with lumps to be examined, hysterical hysterectomies, with decayed teeth. Whilst doctors the same age, with salt and pepper hair, flirt with chatty nurses. Go home, old woman, watch television, cry a little, ball tissues and dab spittle at the corner of your mouth whilst forgetting your words.
I will speak myself. Listen.
Can’t you read? It says don’t step on the grass. He hit me in the face so hard my nose cracked, and blood splattered over dirt and dripped onto my broderie anglaise collar. I beat him later, in chess club.
Van Gogh was mad. Don’t say that, my lecturer tells me about his wife, anorexic, fighting for her mental health.
I’m the drunk girl, good as a boy, showing off in the dark. The car breaking, the thud, the fractured skull nearly ending life.
The tearing episiotomy performed by facemasks, eyes like surgical instruments. Not being prepared, motherhood, the silence, even when screaming.
Then university, and Feminism, and lying about who I am, because being a wife and mother is not enough. The voice of the Other, condemning me with easy essays.
Becoming an artist without space. A lecturer without nepotism. A widow without the merry.
Slowly slipping into obscurity–hearing voices growing stronger and louder.
A tragedy that is me for living a life that is not mine.
Then come the rejections, returned, unread.
She is not Ernest Hemingway.
Julie Holland is an Australian author known for the crime thriller series, The Swan River Killers. Julie worked as a teacher for many years, both in Australia and the UK, and now lives in Perth, where, when not writing, she restores a house on the beach.
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