Month: October 2012

Trespassers will be prosecuted

‘You’re not living up to our standards ,’ I said to my
sister as we walked together to school. 
Up Cox Street through Robross and onto Centre Dandenong Road.  The traffic whizzed past.
My sister’s school bag flapped at her side , but with her
free hand she reached out and grabbed my hat.  Up and over the fence into the nearest yard.  I could see my hat through the fence
slats caught in the branches of a rose bush.
‘Look what you’ve done,’ I wailed.  ‘Go and get it.’
‘No way,’ she said. 
‘Get it yourself.’ 
‘But it’s trespassing.’  This much I knew: to go uninvited into someone else’s
territory was against the law. 
Trespassers will be prosecuted.
My sister was already bad.  She had written on the central blackboard at school, two
letters that defaced Mother Xavier’s orderly list, headed by the single word
MARKS.
Marks for order, for punctuality, for application and the
big one, worth five points, marks for deportment.
  
My sister had added the two letters ‘re’ to the word marks,
‘remarks’ and Mother Xavier had summoned the entire school to find the culprit.  Can you imagine my shame when my sister finally put up her
hand?
She lost her shield: two full marks for deportment, ten
points, and took a letter home to our mother.
Our poor mother, overburdened with trying to find the money
to pay our school fees and here was my sister abusing the privilege.
‘You go and get my hat,’ I said again, but my sister had
shot off ahead.
‘You’ll miss the train,’ she called back.
I had no choice then but to break the law. I slipped the latch on the gate, fearful of every
creak.  I slid up the pathway and
hunched my shoulders.  I had a plan.
If anyone came out I would apologise and tell them the wind
had blown my hat over their fence. 
No matter there was no wind. 
I could see a television screen flickering through the scrim curtains in
the front room.  The rumble of
noise.
I snatched my hat off the bush and ran for it.
‘Don’t you ever do that again, or I’ll report you to the
prefects,’ I said to my sister. 
‘And I’ll report you for not wearing your hat.’

And so it goes, sibling rivalry at its best.  

The black virgin

There are bodies lying face down in
the river, black bodies face down in the river, three, five, ten of them, some
bobbing close to the shore, others further from the edge, almost as if someone has
laid out a raft of black boulders across the surface of the river, stepping
stones that I might glide across to get from one side to the other.  But I am too terrified to move.
I lean against the curved trunk of
a river gum branch that throws itself across the water and try to hide even as
I catch glimpses of the naked bodies floating down the river.  Their long wavy hair and slender
outlines suggest to me that they are women, young women, all of them I know have somehow been raped first then tossed aside to drown in the river. 
This is my dream.  I who live in the south eastern corner of Australia and rarely if ever catch sight of a full blown aboriginal, I dream of
their massacre.
 Landscape typical of my dream without the water. 
Among the many times when we left
home to escape my father’s drunken outbursts there was a time when we stayed in my
older brother’s flat in Hawthorn. 
He left for work early in the morning to his job with a commercial
printer and we four kids, we middle children, had to fend for ourselves for the
day. 
There were many such days in my
childhood memory, days when we had nothing to do, no plans, no money, no home
base from which to move, stuck in someone else’s house where we were required
to amuse ourselves with books or card games, or conversation and walks
nearby. 
We should not eat too much – a
single sandwich for lunch, a cup of tea.  My brother’s cupboard was that of
a single bachelor who cared little for eating at home.
The flat was situated in an old red
brick house, split level, one step down to an old linoleum kitchen.  I spent part of my time walking up and
down between the kitchen and living room examining the few objects my brother
possessed.  
He had carved a head
out of a lump of wood, his own head like a death mask, a self
portrait. 
There was also a book, with whose title I
associate my dream, Bony and the Black Virgin.  On the back cover I read she was a ‘lubra’, this
black virgin.  The word virgin had
long troubled me, a word from religion, the blessed virgin, a word that had a
hands off feel though I still did not know what it meant other than that it
suggested someone young, a young woman. 
How did someone lose her virginity?
I wondered.  Was it like losing your purse, or your train ticket, or something else
that might be important as a means of getting about in the world? 
I had none of these things to begin
with.  We had stolen our way here
on the train, avoided buying a ticket because we did not have enough money and
I had no money to put in a purse let alone owned a purse that could hold
money.  
How could I even find my
virginity enough to one day lose it?