by David Vernon
“You’ll get all of my rings when I die,” she’d said that day on the beach as she turned her face towards mine. As if the similarity of our hands had decided it for her, rather than the fact that I was her first-born, and only, daughter. I could see two tiny replicas of me reflected in her sunglasses.
“Don’t say that, Mum.” Secretly, I felt guilty because a greedy part of me wanted those rings.
And I remembered sneaking into her bedroom, an inquisitive five year-old, to open her jewellery box and marvel at the sparkling stones and shiny beaded necklaces coiled within. There sat my favourite ring, a piece of blue topaz, cut from a clear summer sky and set on a band of gold. When I placed the ring on my middle finger, it felt heavy as an untold secret. The gold band was far too large for my tiny finger, sliding off if I didn’t hold it carefully.
Recalling this memory, I dug my toes into the sand as if my feet were shovels, and lifted my legs into the air, letting the cool chunks of sand fall over both of us. Why was she talking about death? The idea seemed ridiculous on such a perfect day. She must have sensed my mood darken. “We all have to die sometime,” she said, and smiled at me. Although I already knew the details, I asked her to tell me the story behind the blue topaz ring, of how my father had given it to her when they were still courting. Our hands plaited the sky and my mother’s story into a ribbon of blue above us. A ribbon of story suspended in the haze of that summer day.
Now, as an adult woman, I contemplate the black-and-white framed photograph of my mother, taken when she was about nineteen. It is a close-up of her face, with her hands gracefully folded together and resting against her right cheek. Here, there is no sign of the arthritis that later gripped her knuckles. Those hands seem too still, for when I picture my mother, her hands are nearly always in motion. For her, doing made life meaningful.
Her hands wrote thousands of shopping lists; soothed my forehead when I was fevered from bronchitis; created works of art on the canvases of thousands of women’s faces; were relentless in their need to wash, shine and polish.
Her hands churned oceans of chocolate cake mixture; wrote funny notes with smiley faces and hid them amongst the sandwiches in my school lunch box; hacked a live taipan snake into pieces in the back yard with a garden hoe; sewed my school uniforms and long flannel floral nighties for the five weeks of cooler weather Queenslanders called winter.
Her hands fluttered in the air around her, emphasizing the beats as she cooked to music; smudged her face with wet mascara as she cried after she left my father; massaged other women’s hands for a living; smelt of sweet milky hand cream and black coffee.
Her hands conjured decadent Indian curry feasts for special occasions; were careful not to tremble as she told me of the lump growing in her breast; saved paw-paw seeds on a saucer and magicked them into a tree; tapped impatiently on the steering wheel at red lights.
Her hands applauded with pride when I directed my first play; covered her scarred chest in shame after the mastectomy as I helped her to dress; cut toast into fingers which she would dip into her soft-boiled egg, little finger held delicately askew; etched sophisticated cheekbones into my face for my Year Twelve formal.
Her hands cooked casseroles and spaghetti sauce for the homeless; lay strangely still against the starched hospital sheets after the chemotherapy; wrote long letters and sent me extravagant parcels of French perfume in my first year away at University; covered her face in fear that she would not beat the cancer.
Her hands hugged me tight, tighter after the brain tumour was discovered.
Her hands remained perfectly manicured although she could no longer write.
Her hands cradled mine as a mouth cradles words when she could no longer speak.
Her hands would not grasp the wild rose that I lay on her breast as she lay in her coffin.
Now the blue topaz ring sits firmly on my middle finger. Like my mother, I wear it when I go out, but not when I am working. Blue topazes, I discovered, are traditionally worn for protection. So I wear it when I need a little extra courage, and I feel as if I carry a part of her, and a precious fragment of long-ago tropical summers, into my day.
Sometimes I think of her ashes, scattered on that beach, carried out on the waves, as she requested. Suspended eternally in the haze of a summer day.
I have my mother’s hands, although my lines tell of different stories. Yet within my own stories are traces of her stories. Like a palm-reader, I scour the lines on my own hand for clues. We are connected, my mother and I. By blood. And by lineage. I see these lines on my mother’s hands, extending into space, trailing across time, spanning that which separates the living from the dead. Sticky with story and fate, her lines alight on my palms and merge with my own.
Lineage: any persons in a line of descent from a common ancestor.
We are connected, my mother and I. I remember her hands in seeing my own. When I cook a recipe given to me by mother, and it tastes exactly as she used to make it taste, I feel this connection.
I have my mother’s hands, but not all of her stories.
If the lump in her breast could have spoken, what sorrows might it have told?
For her hands wrote not a word in the diary she bequeathed to me of the daughter she gave birth to, nine years before my own birth.
This story I did not hear from my mother. This story which enfolds many stories. And in my imagination, some of the lines etched in my mother’s palms are now no longer merely lines, but scars. Unhealed scars from untold stories. Furrowed deep with sorrow and shame. Jagged with decades of silence.
I am not the first-born, and only, daughter of my mother.
In every scar, there lies the story of the wounding. And for every wound, there exists, somewhere, the medicine. How should I begin to turn scar into story? I see myself returning to our secret summer place, seating myself on that beach, pen in hand. I look up into the endless blue of the sky.
“Mum?” I will whisper. “Tell me a story.”
“There are many stories here,” a palm-reader once said to me, “Many stories.”
The facts:
Set predominantly in Queensland in the 70’s and 80’s, this is an exploration of mother-daughter relationships through the themes of lineage, loss, family secrets and cancer. It is also a portrait of my mother’s life, and her determined bravery to continue caring and loving those around her, sketched out by the memories of what she did with her hands. As all mothers show love by doing. In loving memory of my vibrant, full-of-life mother, Kay Coffey.
Melissa Coffey (B.A Hons) is a Melbourne-based writer/performer. Writing across several genres, she engages strongly with themes of the Feminine, and is fascinated by the place where words emerge from our most physical of experiences. Recently, her work has featured in the literary journal Etchings #12 “Visual Eyes” and she was a feature reader at Melbourne’s Mother Tongue. Publications also include fiction & non-fiction explorations on sexuality (sometimes incognito).
Justice 1892
— Carmel Lillis
In the kitchen of Hawthorne Villa, two girls huddle on a bench next to an unlit wood stove. A bougainvillea, heavy with purple flowers, occasionally scratches the window. The girls’ hair is unbrushed and unbraided. It is lunchtime. Scraps of cold mutton fat and the crust off a roughly sawn loaf of bread litter the table. The room reeks of something stale and forgotten.
At the click of metal-tipped boots on the slate verandah, the girls squeeze even closer together. Dust mites shimmer in a slice of sunshine as the door opens. Straight-backed in his uniform their father strides in, holding out The Brisbane Courier.
“Hilda. I wish you to read this article,” he says, addressing the taller girl. The smaller girl shudders at the finger protruding from his clenched fist, so exactly does it remind her of the gun in her father’s holster.
“Papa,” moans Hilda through a down-turned mouth just like his own. “When will you punish us? Only do it soon, please. For the waiting is so terrible.
We would rather get it over with.” She pokes her little sister in the back. “Ellen, you speak, too.”
Ellen opens and shuts her mouth like a baby bird. Muffled sounds strangle deep in her throat. She gives up. Stares ahead out of shocked hazel eyes.
Hilda takes the newspaper and pretends to read. Her shoulders shake with her sobs, but the only sounds in the room are the tick, tick of the clock on the wooden mantel-piece, and the rasp of thorns against the window.
“Read it aloud,” the father orders. Hilda shakes her head. She cannot believe he would ask this of her.
But his jaw tightens.
Her pale eyes jumping, Hilda begins: Two little girls, aged 10 and 14, daughters of the head warden of the Toowoomba Gaol, were yesterday charged with the theft of 112 items from the home of a neighbour. They were released on bail into the care of their father. The charges will be heard in The Circuit Court next month.
Ellen rocks to the shrill of her sister’s voice, her arms wrapped across her chest to clutch her thin shoulders.
“Papa, we are sorry. You must believe we are sorry.” Hilda grasps her father’s hand, smothers it with kisses and tears.
“And why would that be, Hilda?” interrogates the father, his glare as cold as the stone floor upon which they stand.
“For the disgrace we’ve brought on you.” Her father waits. ‘For A … for the servant running away.” Buoyed by her father’s silence, she ventures, “For Mama being so sad at how dishonest we’ve turned out.”
The warden peels her hand from his arm. “Hold your tongue, Hilda. Your tears will hasten nothing. Your punishment will come … how it will come.” For a moment, his shoulders slump, and he mutters as if to himself: “It will come to us all, I fear.” In the next moment he is again straight-spined and rigid.
He turns with the precision of an officer who has rebuked an errant junior, and can now mark off a task well-completed. At the sight of his back, even Ellen unfurls a little.
When the door bangs, Hilda seizes Ellen’s hair and whispers through her own sobs, “I thought you were going to tell. So help me God, if you tell them I made you, your life won’t be worth living.”
“I’ll say nothing, Hilda. I promise, I promise. Nothing.” The little girl sinks onto the floor and draws her knees up to her face. Once more she rocks back and forth. “I need Mama,” she whimpers. “Mama. Why has she taken to her bed? It isn’t she who’s going to gaol. She’s done nothing wrong. Oh, I need my Mama.”
Hilda snorts. Dirty streaks across her face are all that remain of her tears. “I’m going to listen to what Papa is telling Mama,” she says. And she tiptoes out, leaving the door slightly ajar. Little Ellen clamps her hands over her ears to block out the scraping of the bougainvillea, for it feels to her as if it is scouring her brain like their servant once scoured their pots and pans.
When she returns, Hilda’s lip is curled. “How like the Ice Man. Crying, I’m sure he was crying. All sorts of silly things he was saying.” She adopts her father’s deep monotone to continue: Are you sure Elizabeth? They don’t deserve such love, Elizabeth. Well if your mind is made up. One day they will understand how much you loved them, Elizabeth. “But,” reverting to her own treble, “to us he’s always: Run along girls. I don’t have time. No wonder the others have all left.” She stabs the table with the breadknife and gouges a track along the wood grain.
Six weeks later, and the aroma of baking fills the kitchen of Hawthorne Villa, just as it used to. But the bougainvillea has been pruned back to a stump, and sunlight streams in. The pregnant wife of the new warden is sitting on a chair as far from the wood stove as she can.
“What were they like, the family that had to leave this house?”
The servant holds up a flour-covered hand to tuck a stray strand of hair into her hat and wipe the sweat from her forehead. “I don’t like to speak ill of no-one Miss,” she says, and she takes up the rolling pin.
“Come, you can do them no harm now. And surely you owe them no loyalty. You might have been implicated too, for all they cared.”
The servant bites her lip. She concentrates on the pastry — and to each roll of the pin, she adds a detail as if it is being crushed out of her. “ He … polite, stand-offish. The little girl … a dear wee girl. Hilda … a strange child, furtive as a fox. But Mrs Elizabeth … well, I never would have thought … she was that good to me … real kind. I was happy here until …”
The door opens and the new warden, straight-backed in his uniform, strides in. He hands his wife The Brisbane Courier, gesturing to an article he has circled. Before leaving, he asks after his wife’s health.
Bending the newspaper to the light, the pregnant woman utters a cry.
“What is it, ma’am?” The servant takes a step towards her.
“No, I’m fine. Only listen to this: Toowoomba: January 27th: Two little girls Ellen and Hilda L_____who were charged with stealing 112 articles from the house of Joseph F_____, were brought up today on remand, and discharged with a severe caution. They were released into the care of their father. Their mother, Elizabeth L_____, who gave herself up to police last month, was sentenced in the Circuit Court to a years’ imprisonment with hard labour for inciting two unknowing minors to commit theft for her own financial advantage, and for receiving goods knowing them to be stolen.
Tears plop onto the pastry. The servant kneads them into the dough.
The new warden’s wife sniffs and strokes her swollen belly. She shakes her head sorrowfully as she speaks. “To think,” she says, “that woman once sat in this very kitchen as I do now. What sort of a mother could do what she did? What sort of a mother?”
The facts:
In 1891, my grandmother (aged ten) and her sister were charged with theft. Their mother had been suffering depression following the deaths of two little children, and the girls spent significant amounts of time alone. The girls’ names were published in The Brisbane Courier, adding to the suffering. My great-grandmother, to protect her children, told the police that she had ‘put them up to it.’ The girls were released, but she was convicted of a crime she did not commit. Her life (she was 50 years) had been ‘blame-free.’ The family was shunned. The father lost his job as Governor of Toowoomba Gaol.
Carmel Lillis lives in Melbourne’s western suburbs with her husband, youngest three of her five children and a menagerie of animals which her children’s friends refer to as the ‘farm.’ She is a secondary school teacher interested in writing stories that explore issues of social justice. Her work has been published in Award Winning Australian Writing 2009, 2010 and 2013 and she has twice won the Harold Goodwin statuette in the Henry Lawson Grenfell Literary Awards. Carmel has also been published in the Stringybark anthology, Between Heaven and Hell.
Allawah Grove
— Silda Trainor
It’s the 1960s and Allawah Grove Aboriginal settlement is hidden in the bush, a few miles from the sanitary sanctity of Perth in Western Australia, near Midland, an outer suburb, a place best known for its abattoirs.
To get there, we turn off at the new Bell Brothers’ mansion with its startling stretch of green lawn and gardens of loud red canna lilies waving to the sky, hit a rough road and drive a short while through ugly scrub until the third world shanty town emerges.
Dad slows the car down to drive through Allawah Grove. By now I am already down on the floor in the back. I always slip off my seat and grab a scrap of paper, anything, pretending to read, shivering into the foetal position, disappearing myself. Don’t stop. Don’t!
Dad always stops the car. And Mum leans across him smiling encouragement to whoever approaches, “Hello Beryl.”
Beryl pushes her bruised face through the open window, a happy smile, teeth missing, while Wally lurching behind blasts us with alcohol fumes, collapsing against the car, “Hi there Miz Renna, hi Len, ey’ there’s only four kids, where’s Biddy?”
“She’s there.”
I uncurl, feeling sick and drag myself upright, gla
nce over and mumble, “Hello.”
“Come down later and do some cooking,” Mum tells Beryl. “We’re going to make scones.”
Dad drives on carefully avoiding the pitted tarmac and kids darting around.
I slump back on the seat trembling, not daring to look out the window until we get to our huts, a short distance away from the main area. Grouped closely together there is one for cooking, another for donated clothes and a library.
Dad then leaves us and goes home driving back to Fremantle so far away.
My big brothers let loose take off into the bush exploring, while my little brother and sister hang around Mum. I stay there only awhile, get bored then brave and go by myself next door to the library — a fancy name for the dingy shed with stacks of old embossed leather bound volumes, huge early 1900s annuals for children and more recent paperbacks.
Crouching in a corner, bent over The Girl’s Own Annual, I read how to make candied violets, flip the musty pages, settle down and lose myself. Tumbling into the pictures of little coves and green grass-covered hills of England, I’m walking to the pebbly beach with my chums. The sky is a glorious blue, the sea is sparkling and we’re going to have a jolly picnic.
Pearl and Dawny wander away from the main settlement, through the hot soft sand, past the gums and spindly wattles, towards the huts, hoping for a feed. Their bare feet kick up little puffs behind, creating a dusty wake as they walk along the track.
Getting closer, they can see smoke fleeing the chimney and start to giggle and bump each other, feeling a bit scared and shy.
“She is there,” Dawny squeals excitedly. “That Wadgela, Miz Renna, everyone reckons she’s a real Noongar.”