by David Vernon
“It’s Christmas.”
Before long there’s seven of us under the tree, cross-legged, hair askew, wide eyes staring at the presents. We count one each. Grandad hands them out, each one grasped by eager hands. My fingers tremble as I pick at the wrapping, careful not to rip it. Then I see her. She’s dressed in a blue gown and tiny silver shoes, golden hair falling to her waist. I lift the box with a grin and wrap my arms around her. It’s Barbie. My eyes find Mum talking to Auntie Beryl, and then I see her on the wall behind.
Red glasses dominate her pixie face, dancing green eyes beneath. She’s second from the right, lined up with her brother and sisters. A light brown frame surrounds them, the glass a little dusty. Her eyes mock me, immortalised the day before it happened; telling me it’s my time soon.
Flashes of memory immobilize my limbs, imagination giving me the details nobody else did. They were coming back from the beach, skin lobster-red, gritty with sand and salt, dog-happy. The sun was low, and the kangaroo came bounding out of nowhere. The ute skidded across the road, through a barbed wire fence, slamming into a tree. It rolled a couple of times, spewing kids and eskies into the dirt. Annette flew that day, dress billowing as she fluttered aground like a windless kite. She was still breathing when the siren howled in the distance and stars peppered the sky.
I woke to someone crying, deep howling sobs that have my fists around the sheets and blood pounding. I curl up tight.
“She’s gone.”
Auntie Beryl, what’s she doing here at night? I strain to hear more, heart thudding, bed covers cupping my chin.
“M … my beautiful Annette, my lovely girl…”
Mum mumbles amid the scrape of chairs and chink of cups. Auntie Beryl sobs. She never cries. I tremble at the noise.
Sliding from bed, I tiptoe through the lounge to the kitchen doorway. The floorboards creak and I freeze, holding my breath. Auntie Beryl stays slumped in the nearest chair, her face buried in a hankie. I yearn to wrap myself in her soft arms, but dare not. I eye my mother’s back as she hunches over the bench making coffee, dressing gown swishing. Her feet are bare. Auntie Beryl lifts her head and a stranger’s face stares up with empty eyes.
“They tried but there was nothing … oh my God she’s dead.”
I flee to the bedroom, launching myself at the bed, yanking the covers up. Hot tears mix with snot. She’s dead, she’s dead. Vomit hits my throat and blood whooshes in my ears. I want to run away, but stay glued to the bed in a tight ball, howling. She’s just a kid, not old enough to die, just a kid. My tear-soaked pillow, turns cold beneath my cheek.
We never got the full story. They said we were too young. Mum talked about heaven and flowers for the funeral, but we weren’t allowed to go, couldn’t say good-bye. It took time, but I worked it out myself. She was the second eldest of four, like me and I would soon be ten, like her.
The photo comes back into focus and I swipe at my eyes. I skip across the room, clutching my doll and skidding on Christmas wrap, stumbling down the stairs to flee into the paddock. Stabbing pain in my foot pulls me up and I squat to pluck the prickles from my heel. Forgot my thongs. I hop back to the stairs and sit, arms wrapping Barbie until Mum calls me to breakfast.
I’m filled with nerves on the eve of my eleventh birthday, hugging everyone good night twice and reorganizing my stuffed toys so many times, Mum is yelling at me to go to bed. I tuck my toys in for the last time and reluctantly hop in beside them, before leaping up to say a prayer. Please God, don’t make it hurt. Back in bed I try to stay awake, but my eyelids grow too heavy.
My eyes feel the light before I see it. Its warmth prickles my skin, bright rays piercing beneath the lids. This must be heaven. A giggle tickles my ear. Annette? I strain for recognition. Must be dreaming. Something bumps my leg and my eyes struggle open. Someone giggles and whispers.
“Wake up, wake up.”
My eyes spring wide to a sea of faces. Mum? My sisters jostle the sides of the bed. They’re smiling, elbowing for room. Are they dead too?
“Happy birthday!”
My little sister bounces on the bed beside me. I see my shelf and Ted’s lopsided stare, over her head. Mum holds a cake, the candles dripping wax onto the pink frosting. I count eleven.
“Come on — blow them.”
I push myself up and blow hard, watching the smoke rise from eleven tiny wicks. I’m not ten anymore. My heart leaps as I reach for the present in my sister’s outstretched hands.
The facts:
Eleven Candles is set in Queensland and based on true life events. When I was eight years old my cousin, Annette, was travelling in the back of a utility when it crashed. She was thrown from the car on impact and died on the operating table from internal blood loss.
It was never fully explained to me and never talked about in our family. After thinking about the similarities between us, I decided that I would also die when I was ten and spent the next two years believing it.
Sharon Haste is a nurse/midwife with a Masters in Writing. She lives in Darwin, Northern Territory, with her partner, Mark, and four of their six children, working as a school nurse in a boarding college for remote Indigenous and international students. She also teaches adolescent childbirth education. Sharon won the Twisted Stringybark Award in 2012 for her story Tainted Innocence, which will also be published in the Award Winning Australian Writing Anthology 2013.
Shoes at Oyster Bay
— Judy O’Connor
It cost two shillings (20 cents) to go to the Saturday matinee pictures when I was a child in the 1950s. You couldn’t say that was a lot.
My sister and I would walk two kilometres to the Oyster Bay School of Arts where a nervous looking man with ancient equipment would screen our weekly diet of cowboys and Indians or Spanish Armada movies. There were always guns and swordfights — with the baddies inevitably being forced towards a cliff where they would fall to a well deserved death.
Predictable and a million miles from our reality. But that was the attraction.
Also predictable was the breaking down of the over-worked projector. You knew there was trouble when the film started to jerk and shudder. Then, the long, droning sound as the volume ground to a halt. A flutter of broken film and that was it. The lights would come on and a collective groan of disappointment sweep down the aisles. Sometimes we were lucky. The projector would spring back to life and away we’d go. But, most of the time, things went the other way and the harassed owner would step onto the stage.
“You’ll all have to go home. It’s broken. But you can come back tonight and get in for nothing.” He’d turn and hurry off before the kids in the front row could yell, or throw something.
“Didn’t he know?” I’d think to myself, bitter with disappointment. “We’re just kids. We’re not allowed to go out at night. How can we come back?”
So, I’d trudge home, deflated and disappointed.
That was the routine. Except for one Saturday. We’d asked our father the usual question,
“Can we go to the pictures, Dad?”
He was mixing cement, shovelling sand and pebbles into the mixer, intent with head down. Instead of the army hat he often wore, he’d taken a handkerchief, tied a knot in each corner, and put it on his head as sun protection. Maybe he was downcast, burdened by the weight of the job ahead — working at a desk job all week and building a house for us on weekends while we lived in a corrugated iron shed with dirt floor and no hot water. My mother cooked on a pump-up Primus stove that would light with a fierce whoosh that would’ve taken her hair off if she hadn’t remembered to lean back.
His answer was short. “No, you can’t go today,” he told us.
It made no sense. Why? We always went on Saturdays. There must be a mistake. I asked a few more times. He kept on shovelling, not looking up. Eventually he said, “No. No, you can’t go. Your shoes are too dirty.” His voice was curt, the scrape of the shovel filled the air.
It sounded strange, but — okay. Off
we went to the laundry in the lean-to bathroom beside the tin shed, found a rag, soaked it in cold water and carefully smoothed it over our shoes until they shone and gleamed. I don’t know why we didn’t use shoe polish. Had we run out? Or was there none?
We hurried back. “Look. We’ve cleaned them. Look.” I was so pleased we’d made things right. But things weren’t right; even as a ten-year-old, I knew something was going on.
He put down the shovel, pulled the handkerchief off his head and wiped the sweat off his face. He was wearing his old leather apron, blackened by the sweat and grime of endless labour. It had different sized pockets for the tools he used the most. I was fascinated by the pencil stub that slipped into a spot on the side. Instead of being rounded and fat, it was as flat as a pancake, with thick black lead and a blunt point. I liked it because I associated it with the sense of satisfaction my father got when he measured something, with a few nails held between his teeth, and marked the distance with a firm notch. I noticed the bag was sagging slightly like the gun-slingers’ belts at the Saturday matinees.
I wasn’t prepared for the stab of emotion I felt some forty years later when, alone with two small children, I glanced through the kitchen window one morning and saw him swinging a pick, breaking the solid rock and using his bare hands to build a retaining wall, filling the gaps with dirt and smaller stones. He’d travelled from Queensland to organize an extension to my house in Sydney and, while the builders hammered and sawed, he’d picked up a shovel and turned his hand to some hard labour. He was well into his 70s, waist thickened, but the battered hat, work trousers and bent back shot me back to those Oyster Bay days.
As a young man with a wife and two daughters who’d looked to him for everything, he’d taken on the job of building a house with his bare hands, in the post-war do-it-yourself era of the 1950s where you learnt on the job. He’d started by blowing up the sandstone in nearby bushland with gelignite to make foundations and finished, some two years later, by making the picket fence, venetian blinds and even the refrigerator. The wall he built in my house is still there and will long outlive these words.
On that Saturday, when I was a child desperate to get to the Saturday matinee, my father slowly looked up, his eyes resting on our shining shoes. There was silence for a few minutes, then something seemed to give way in him. He seemed to sink a bit. He took us aside, away from the gravel and sand. “You can’t go to the pictures. I haven’t got enough money to give you.”
It must have been a terrible moment for him. He was barely thirty years old with the weight of providing for a young family and building a house out of the bush and clay without help and without really knowing how.
I didn’t see all this at the time but there was something in his — what was it? Humility? Suddenly, going to the pictures meant nothing. My father had shown his emotions, shared something, and that meant the world to me.
The facts:
This is a true account of an incident that occurred to me in my childhood growing up in the outer suburbs of post-war Sydney. Most families consisted of wife at home and husband as sole breadwinner. Building costs and shortage of materials meant people had to be resourceful and hard working in the face of extreme financial difficulties. I tried to convey a personal insight for me with a sketch of the times.
Judy O’Connor left school at fifteen and wrote her first stories on the train travelling to and from work. Some years later, a story she wrote about being lost on a bushwalk, was published in a New Zealand newspaper and she was offered a job as a journalist. She went on to work for newspapers, magazines and other publications in Sydney and elsewhere. She has published and contributed to several books and won various short story awards.
Ursa Major
— Kerry Cameron
When you pitch your tent beneath the tall ponderosa pines at the end of the lonely forest road, you don’t give a second thought to things that go bump in the night. You hail from a sunburnt country, where the things you worry about are small and poisonous, not large and hungry. This way of thinking is hard to shake, even on the other side of the world where there are more than snakes and spiders afoot. The glories of Yellowstone, accompanied by its grim warnings of bear encounters and how to avoid them, are now two weeks old and fading from your mind.
So you go about your evening campsite routine with your shiny new husband just the way you would back home. You set up the cooking fire conveniently close to the tent, and after dinner you tip the dirty dishwater onto the pine needles nearby, the sausage residue congealing as it cools. At bedtime, you brush your teeth by the fire and spit your minty-scented toothpaste behind the tent. You don’t bother going far for the final nightly toilet stop either, just beyond the firelight seems reasonable. You’re only staying one night so you don’t dig a proper hole, just a scrape with your boot heel that you kick dirt over after. You never consider the enticing scent trail you are both carelessly strewing into the forest air, it never matters at home.
Fire burning low, you crawl together into your little tent and snuggle into sleeping bags. You’re camping your way around the US, an epic road trip on a humble shoestring, so you spend the night unofficially in state forests to avoid camping fees wherever possible. It’s your turn to scribe the travel journal tonight, so you don the head torch and start scribbling, while your mate slips quickly into sleep. After you’ve finished, you put everything away and slide your shivering shoulders down inside your warm sleeping bag. You’re at reasonable altitude in these isolated mountains in central Arizona, it’s late October and the night is chilly. You lie there for a while, mulling over the day as you slowly drift off.
Until something wakes you. A noise, something odd. You’re sleepy and confused, what was that? Maybe you dreamt it. Then you hear it again, a throaty grunting and snuffling. Something large. Suddenly you’re wide awake, lying on your back, head raised so both ears can strain unencumbered. More grunting. Deep breathing. Something rubbing against a nearby pine trunk.
You reach out and nudge your man. Hiss at him to wake up. No response, so you feel for his face in the dark and accidentally poke him in the eye. Now he’s awake.
“Did you hear that?” Conveniently, whatever it is outside gives another long snuffling grumble.
He freezes, as you did. He hears it. You can feel the instant tension in him that is clenching its iron fingers around your guts. You feel sick.
You both lie there, utterly still, listening urgently for clues of what it could be. And what mood it might be in. More snuffling, more grunting, a cough. Then heavy footfalls, bruising into the thick blanket of pine needles that made this such an inviting place to camp. In the middle of absolutely bloody nowhere with no other people for miles. As it approaches the tent and begins to amble heftily around it, you feel the vibrations as each foot thud hits the ground.
A quietening hand finds your shoulder. The barest whisper in your ear.
“Get into the middle of the tent. Stay in your sleeping bag. Curl into a ball.”
You don’t question this, you know he is recalling the orange warning pamphlet you read a fortnight ago in Wyoming, the story of a backpacker who was scalped last summer when a grizzly bear took a swipe at her tent. You have no idea if this is a bear, but you know it is something very large, it seems prudent to assume the worst. Silently, you scooch into the middle of the tent and huddle together. You’ve never felt more inadequate as a species, your hearing is so imprecise and undisciplined, you can’t see anything in the dark and the closest thing you have to a defensive weapon is a pen, which right now feels a lot less mightier than a sword.
It slowly rumbles back around to the rear of the tent. You can hear each wheezy breath, just metres away, with only a flimsy synthetic fly between you. Your heart is thumping like bass drum on steroids, your chest judders with every beat as it reverberates up your brain stem and crashes against your eardrums. It’s so loud it horrifies you. Shut UP, it’ll hear you! Every tiny hair on your body is standing straight
up, trying to look big and scary, your skin is crawling with nerve endings screaming for information.
A few more heavy steps. The grunting gargles intensify. Oh no, what does this mean? Then it vomits. The retching and gurgling and wet splatting is unmistakable. And then, only one second later because it is so close, the smell hits you. Hot bile, eye-watering and nose wrinkling.
Fear ratchets up into overdrive. Cold sweat, reflexive clenching of hands and toes, itching to run. Is it vomiting to make room for us? Logical thoughts flee. Have to get away, can’t stay here, have to go. Now.
You both know that you should stay put and be still. Wait it out. That’s what the experts would say, but you just can’t. A primeval part of your brain has taken over and says there’s only fight or flight. It seems faking non-existence is not what you’re programmed for.
The vomit stench is still lingering, as you settle together on the only plan you can think of, though neither of you like it. You stealthily slink out of your sleeping bags, silently shove feet into boots and lace them tightly. Locate the two sets of car keys, take one each.
Deep breath. Try to stop shaking.
Creep to the doorway, find the zipper.
Action stations.
“Ready? Got your key?” he breathes.
“Yeah. Should we really do this?”
“No. But here goes.”
With that he fills his lungs and bellows a furious, guttural, angry-bear tirade out through the mesh window panel as you reef open the door zipper. Then you bolt for the car.
It can’t be more than seven or eight metres away but it feels like forever. As you’re sprinting through the darkness you can hear something enormous crashing away in the underbrush behind you. You skid around to your door and try and get the key in the lock, but it’s dark and your hand is shaking uncontrollably, you can’t find the hole. Suddenly the interior light comes on, your husband has made it in, slamming his door behind him as he unlocks yours, then in you tumble, finally, finally inside a solid structure. Your crappy little discard-at-the-airport car has never felt so mighty.