firstwriter.com First Short Story Anthology

by Various Authors

  I remember wondering why everybody was so exercised by the event. After all, to me my grandmother was old and surely expecting to die at any minute. I was aware by then of the fragility of life, its brevity, if not its importance.

  My budgie had recently died, lying at the bottom of its cage stiff and unmoving one morning. I had held him in my hand to try and see where his life had gone. He seemed as real to me dead as he had alive. The lack of movement the stiffness and the chill of his thin flesh were different certainly, but he was still there in my hand.

  After the funeral which I was not allowed to attend, a dead budgie may be an acceptable lesson in death for a six year old but a real funeral was judged too emotional an experience for such a young child, I remember watching my grandfather who seemed subtly altered. He was tearless and stoic as he munched his salmon sandwich, his eyelids so dry they seemed to grate on his eyeballs. Each time he was spoken to he blinked. A quick explosion of blinks then he would take out his handkerchief and wipe his agitated eyes and blow his nose hard like a trumpet. When he did this everyone in the room fell silent and turned to watch him as if he was about to make a speech. When he talked he was terse, his large square hands laying still in his lap like two sick animals. I imagined those hands in bed on the fateful morning creeping across the wrinkled sheet towards my grandmother expecting a warm and comforting presence to cuddle and instead finding a cold dead arm. In my imagination the arm, its flesh stiff and hard, was unaccountably covered in blue feathers.

  I went to my granfather and tried to climb onto his knee. My auntie Dorothy took me by the shoulders and tried to push me down. My grandfather held onto my arm and shook his head.

  "It's all right Dot. She's fine."

  Dot tut-tutted and looked towards my mother for support that my mother wisely pretended not to see. Grandfater's lap was not usually uncomfortable but he was wearing an old and shiny brown suit that smelt of mothballs, a smell I have always since detested, and the front was buttoned up tight. He had on a stiff white collar that pushed his neck into soft wrinkles and a brand new black tie in that lumpy weave that was cheap and popular in the sixties. I tried to undo his buttons to creep inside the jacket to where my grandfather really was, but he stopped me and said "not today chicken, not today."

  I suppose it was at that moment that a suspicion began to form in my thoughts that my grandmother may not be coming back. Something in my grandfather's manner, his extra care as he held me in the circle of his arms, or the minute quiver I could feel in his stiff chest and knees alerted me and scared me at the same time. I put my hands one on each side of his face and made him look at me searching for I don't know what, a denial perhaps? My own face must have communicated my question because as I watched his pink rimmed eyes filled with tears that hung on his lower lids and I waited tense and fascinated to see if they would fall.

  They did not fall of course, he whipped out his handkerchief and performed his routine. Wipe eyes and blow nose hard then he lifted me down onto the floor and took hold of my hand in his large cold one.

  "Come for a little walk, Carol."

  It was difficult for me to understand that my grandmother was really gone. So far it had felt to me that she was just outside putting on more tea or prepearing sandwiches in the kitchen as she always did at family gatherings. Someone so solid in my life, so real, could not just disappear overnight. I had spent the day with her only a week ago and she had walked with me to the post office in the village some two miles away. How could a person, even an old person, walk two miles laughing and talking without any sign of tiredness on one day and then just not be there on the next. Dead did not convey to me the meaning gone. My budgie had stayed in his cage for a day or two until my mother discovered him and then he was removed and a few days later a new budgie appeared. I called him Tom the same as the old one without any sense of incongruity and the two seemed to merge in my mind. I did not feel any loss, just a short interruption in the presence of my budgie.

  I went into the garden holding my grandfather's hand. He appeared much taller in his horrible suit and farther away than when he was dressed in his normal clothes of old trousers and a loose collarless shirt. I thought we would go to his shed where he repaired shoes and made small pieces of furniture in his spare time but he walked down to the end of the garden where there was a wooden seat set under the only tree. This was where my grandmother sat in the summer when she had to peel potatoes or shell peas.

  "Why sit indoors. The job still gets done if I am enjoying the sun as well, doesn't it, chicken?"

  I would sit beside her and watch as she split the green pods with a sharp "pop" that made her smile. Her neat thumb chased the peas tumbling them into the colander. One or two would always fall and she would shout "escapees" and that was my signal to scramble after them as they sped down the slope of her skirt to the ground. I was allowed to eat the runaways and the hard sweet taste of fresh raw peas in my mouth remains.

  This was grandmother's place and I felt disjointed sitting here with my grandfather and at the wrong time of the year. I fidgeted on the wooden seat unused to wearing a skirt, my best dress of satin with a net underskirt, wishing that I was wearing shorts and my plimsolls and that it was a summer afternoon and the sun was shining. My grandfather sat very still gazing at the end of his shed where it stuck out into the garden covering half the end wall of the house. The muted sound of the crowd filtered down to us but they all seemed a long way away. He sighed and ran his large hand over his face.

  "Why don't they all go home. They've done their bit. They could all go and leave me alone now."

  Then he turned and smiled at me, but it was one of those smiles that adults sometimes gave me, a smile that did not mean they were happy, there was another reason they smiled and I could never fathom what it was. It upset me not to understand and I squeezed his hand and did not smile back.

  "You always were a young head on old shoulders."

  He nodded and smiled his baffled smile and rubbed my shoulder and the calluses on his hand snagged on the fine fabric of my dress and set my teeth on edge.

  I had noticed before that to stay silent and look serious in certain situations made adults approve of me, but I had no idea why that worked. It felt like a betrayal to use this trick on my grandfather now but as usual it was successful. Unfortunately I had discovered nothing and my question remained unanswered.

  My grandmother was my mother's mother and as time wennt by and she did not return I began to watch my mother closely. So far as I could see she was unchanged. She rose each morning and cooked breakfast before my father left for work. She made my porridge and told me off for not cleaning my teeth the same as before. Every morning she hugged me and told me she loved me before I went to into school. This was a habit, maybe an obsession, of hers that these words had to be said each time we parted so that they were the words remembered if for any reason we did not meet again. For all my observation I could discern no change in my mother after my grandmother died.

  I went to visit my grandfather soon after and he seemed to be much the same as always. It was odd to see him puting on the kettle and he left the biscuits in the packet instead of using the blue flowery plate that grandmother always used, but he seemed to have resumed his usual demeanour. Nobody mentioned my grandmother.

  We went to his shed and he let me turn on the polishing machine where he buffed the repaired shoes before his customers called to collect them. The smell of polish and machine oil was comforting and I tried not to think that before we would have been banished to the shed in order to get us out from under grandmother's feet while she finished preparing dinner.

  It was not until three or four years after her death that I found the courage to ask my grandfather where my grandmother had gone. It was a question that I had held over from my younger self, by now I was nearly eleven and knew that she was not going to return so my question may have been a little cruel. I asked primarily to see what he would say.

  H
e was sitting in his usual chair in the little room where they used to watch television together. Grandfather did not watch television any more and it stood in the corner with a lace edged cloth covering its dead face. He kept his toolbox on it, a thing that would never have been allowed in the house when my grandmother was alive.

  "Grandad,..."

  He looked up from his paper and grunted, his shaggy eyebrows raised.

  "You know before, when grandma, you know when she..."

  My voice trailed off even now I did not seem able to speak the dread word.

  "When your grandmother died?"

  He helped me out but his face was closed as if I had asked him a question about his sex life. He regarded me steadily his eyes fixed on mine daring me to go on. I quailed before what I divined as his anger. I knew I was treading on ground that bore no footprint but his.

  I took a breath.

  "When grandma died..."

  But I could not go on. His face was rigid and closed. I realised then that he would never speak of it to me. The understanding propelled me to my feet. I felt rejected, expelled.

  "Oh nothing. It doesn't matter."

  I tried to look as casual as I could and fled the room. Outside in the hall I stared hard at the faded linoleum feeling like I had been sent out of the classroom at school for being stupid and rude. I would never ask again. The raw pain on his face had shocked me. I began to see that there was a country where adults existed for which I had no bearings, no maps and no language. It amazed me that so long after the event he could feel this way. I searched inside myself for any hint of grief as real as his and could find none. This made me feel somehow unworthy as if only those who had special knowledge and sensitivity were able to mourn my grandmother and that I was not one of those chosen few and would forever be outside that charmed and privileged circle.

  Sometimes if the season is right I will buy a few peas still in their pods and sit in the sun to eat them. And even now, years later, a corridor opens and I am a child again and I can see her odd sideways smile and feel the gently solidity of her thigh through the thin cotton of her summer dress. Even now that I have myself passed the age at which she died and even though I have grown into that other country and should understand, I am as baffled as I was then and still so sad.

  Table of Contents

  Album: A Story in Photographs

  By Jane Greenwood

  Australia

  An image in the not-too-distant past: After the funeral

  This might make a good photo: a woman in dark clothes sits curled up in an armchair near a window, leafing through a book open on her lap. Afternoon light falls in a shaft across the room, illuminating the book and picking up the faint pattern of roses on the chair. Her face is in shadow but you can see that she is lost in concentration. The book’s covers feel a bit like leather and the texture is rather grainy and lined — like the palm of your hand if you could see it under a microscope, magnified many times.

  The pages are brown and the photographs stuck to them with corners are grey and sepia. The images, pale and ghostly, are like little ships that take her on a voyage in the sea of her memory where she occasionally wanders. Despite her own family, her children who are upstairs, today she feels like Robinson Crusoe, marooned on an island that only she knows about. She looks for familiar faces from the past.

  A man

  This is a tiny sepia photo. A fair, wavy-haired man stands behind a surfboard, a towel slung around his neck. He is tall; the surfboard he is leaning on is one of those old-style, polished wood ones with chisel-shaped ends, one of which rests in the sand. His large forearms are crossed over the other. It looks as if he has just come in from having a swim. He seems pleased with himself and the world. Behind him you can see the water, lacy edges of surf scalloping the beach.

  This is the woman’s father.

  A woman

  A woman in her twenties, looking rather self-conscious, stands squinting into the sun. Her clothes are formal; she carries gloves and a bag, and is wearing high-heeled shoes and a hat, in the manner of the time. Behind her is a building with a chimney, a sugar mill. She has come a long way to marry the surfboard man and live in this tropical place where oaks and beeches and Luna Park are only a memory, but where the bamboo grows palpably overnight and the fields of sugar cane line the roads and their mauve flower spikes wave in the breeze.

  This is the woman’s mother.

  A little boy

  This child is about a year old. He has startlingly fair hair and he sits on the grass in the sun, dressed in a white romper suit. The child is laughing and the click of the shutter has caught him just as he begins to crawl towards the person taking the photo, one little arm outstretched as he leans forward, as if he is eager to take off into his life.

  In the background you can just make out a rocker made of plywood cut into the shape of Pinnochio. This was handed down to the next child and the woman thinks that if this photo were on a computer disk you could colour the rocker that peculiar, hard shade of aqua she suddenly remembers. She can recall the springy feel of the buffalo grass, too, the deep shade under the mango trees in the background and their tender red new growth, and the noise of the flying foxes as they shrieked with gluttony each night as they fed on the ripe, rich mangoes.

  The little boy’s name is Johnno; he was the woman’s brother. He looks very healthy but photographs only show you the outside, she thinks.

  A little girl and her father

  This is a close up of the child in her father’ arms. She is three or so. He has her in the crook of his left arm and with his large right hand he supports her chubby legs. She has been crying. You can see the tears in her eyes and on her cheeks. A rather battered doll with painted hair dangles from the child’s right hand; her left arm is curled about the father’s neck. She is trying to smile. Her fair hair is caught back from her forehead with a bow and her flowered dress has a frilly collar and smocking. This is Margaret, Margie for short.

  If she closes her eyes in later years the woman can remember how far it seemed to the ground from this perch in her father’s tanned arms and how the starch in his shirt smelled clean and made the fabric feel both crisp and smooth.

  She cannot remember quite why she was crying; had she been in trouble? Perhaps this was the day she ventured into the storm water ditch that held innocent, sweet-smelling mown grass in which black snakes liked to hide, or perhaps it was the time, copying her brother, she turned and called cheerfully to her father, "Come and look at this, you bloody drongo!" She cannot say for sure, now, and there is no one left who could tell her.

  Perhaps she had been terrified of the burner, an ugly black steam train that spewed fire out through its iron cow-catcher and burned the weeds that threatened to engulf the train line. Normally, the line carried the big green locos that pulled the sugar cane trucks, driven by cheerful men with knotted handkerchiefs on their heads, who leaned out of the side of the cabins and waved to the kids playing in their yards on either side of the train line. They would run to see the train and yell, "Blow your whistle! Let the steam out!" The drivers would always slow down and with a huge hiss, reduce the pressure in the boiler in a billowing of white steam and then blow the train’s whistle till the kids put their hands over their ears and fell to the ground shrieking with laughter.

  But the burner came with a noise like all the dragons in the world and it breathed fire and left a swathe of charred devastation behind it. At the mere sound of it, the little girl would run into the house screaming. When she and her mother went to the tennis courts the shortest way led in front of the cavernous loco sheds but she refused to go there and they always took the long way round, by the stands of bamboo that creaked in the wind.

  Despite the tears on her face the child is smiling. She is being held by her father; her brother, home from boarding school, and her mother, are just out of the photo, but always there.

  Certainly, she cannot know that only five or so years on, her f
ather’s laugh will be stilled forever. Or that her own children will enter a world where her mother’s face will have to be learned from a fading image in an album.

  The girl and her playmates

  Three children sit together at the foot of a flight of white stairs that lead up to the verandah of Margie’s house. They have been to the Show. Margie is holding a kewpie doll on a stick that she got from one of the stalls. Like all kewpie dolls this one, for some reason, has its thumb in its mouth. When its pink tulle dress becomes tatty the doll will be untied from the stick and used as the baby Jesus in Margie’s Christmas crèche, alongside Mary and Joseph, made out of dolly pegs and clothed with scraps purloined from the sewing basket. Margie will ignore her mother’s pleas to take her thumb out of her mouth. "Jesus sucks his thumb," she will say triumphantly.

  The other children are brothers from a few doors up and they are not always good playmates, forever running home in the middle of a game. Their mother has threatened that if they do not behave she will give them to the old black man they sometimes see from the verandah, walking like a shadow in among the trees across the river, his swag on his back. The brothers run home regularly to check that they have been good enough to escape being given away. Their fear is infectious.

  The woman is ashamed now of the terror that was not learned in her own home and about which she never spoke. Not until the day she was swinging on her rocking horse and the man came to the verandah door with a papaw for her brother, who had been sick again lately. She had been singing, crooning away in that almost tuneless, soothing way that children have, and she looked up and saw the gnarled old face framed in the mosquito-netted top of the screen door. She had shrieked so loudly her mother came running out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron as she ran. Margie’s loud cries were a family joke; she had been lost in a shop in town once and had just stood and wailed until her parents came and found her, joking that she wouldn’t have been lost for long at that rate. This was different and her mother was plainly embarrassed by her noise. But the man had a gentle face under the shapeless khaki hat he wore, and a soft voice, and he said kindly, "It’s alright, Missus. I just startled the little missy."