by Carmel Bird
Volume 7: Issue 2
Carmel Bird & Susie Greenhill
Imprint
Published by Review of Australian Fiction
“From Paradise To Wonderland” Copyright © 2013 by Carmel Bird
“This Butterfly” Copyright © 2013 by Susie Greenhill
www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com
* * *
This project has received financial assistance from the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.
And support from the Queensland Writers' Centre
Editorial
Tasmania and its arts scene have been receiving a vast amount of national and international attention since the opening of MONA in early 2011. Gone, at least for the moment, are the references to two heads and the condemnation of the state as a cultural backwater. There were, quickly, a lot of minds changed about this place, both from those already residing on the island and from elsewhere. People who may have been the purveyors of two-headed jokes and desperate forays to the mainland for some culture are now eager to own a little bit of this paradise themselves. We rejoice, here on the ground, and smile inwardly at how we have been ‘discovered’. Many consider this attention as munificence from on high, and while there is a palpable shift in how Tasmania is now perceived and a tangible increase to certain pecuniary bottom lines we are yet to see this play out in the literary world. It is true that this beautiful place is getting more acknowledgement and accolades than it has received since early colonial times, but very little of this attention is focussed on the state’s creative writers.
‘From Paradise to Wonderland’, the title of Carmel Bird’s short story included in this issue, seems as if it could be facetious. The starting point of the story, a vineyard run by two brothers and their wives, a castle on a hill, (paradise) and the destination, Byron Bay (wonderland), do not seem to correspond with the mythic sense of paradise or of a fairytale wonderland. Wonderland sounds more like the name of a theme park, and it is used in the story as the name provided for the destination, as a distraction for children, who flee ‘paradise’ with their mother. There is a denouement, within a suggested biblical framework, of a fall from grace in paradise, though the story does not follow the characters of Adam, Eve or even the brothers Cain and Abel; it tells of those left behind–the minor characters of paradise–and the repercussions for them. They move to Byron.
Carmel Bird was born in Tasmania and now resides in Castlemaine. She is a prolific writer. A novelist, editor, anthologist, short story writer, and author of children’s literature, she has also written on the craft of writing. ‘Dear Writer’ was first published in 1988 will be released again in October this year, this time revised, and electronically.
It is easy to compare Carmel’s writing to painting, in particular the size of the canvas and the detail afforded each piece. Her novels are often ornate, dense with threads sewed onto the canvas; textural. Her short stories are simple, yet the simplicity belies something more—with less texture than the novels, fewer layers, but still deep on reflection.
Susie Greenhill is devoutly Tasmanian. She has set her story in Perth, Western Australia. ‘This Butterfly’ is a beautiful, harsh story of two homeless youths and their rough treatment in the world. A butterfly is a perfect motif for the story and it is effected without a whiff of triteness, as butterflies are wont to embody in the wrong hands. Butterflies are figures of such transitory, temporary, fragile beauty and this is echoed not only in the character of Beth, who is bashed and left unconscious and bloody at the beginning of the story, but also in the relationship between Beth and Miles, her young companion and only stalwart.
There is a sense of existence on tenterhooks as you read this story of two homeless kids, deserted by the support systems we presume exist for the likes of them, unprotected and without the carapace that adulthood provides.
Carmel and Susie write here in very different styles. Both their stories tell of exile and exclusion and both are finely crafted pieces of literature that in some way emanate from Tasmania. The first ever Australian novel was published here (Quintus Servinton by Henry Savery), and the first published Australian woman (Mary Grimwade) wrote in Van Diemen’s Land, and while the roaring creativity from within has never been extinguished, it is good to have a more flattering commentary and wider recognition of this thrown our way again.
Rachel Edwards
@paigelovesbooks
From Paradise To Wonderland
Carmel Bird
I drove past the house yesterday. It’s twenty-three years now, twenty-three years since we all left. Well, we left in stages, bit by bit, but it’s certainly twenty-three years since I loaded the old Pajero and the camping trailer and headed off. Packed up to the gills. The kids, the dog and the kitchen sink. I can’t believe I did it, now that I think back. We ended up in Byron, but we started there, at the house in beautiful Tasmania, with grape vines like a green pattern on a blanket sloping away down the hillside.
We left the dog with my sister Emily in Burnie, and that was just about my one regret. Jake and Skye, poor kids, were heartbroken. They had had Loopy all their lives, but I promised them they could have any pet they wanted when we got where we were going. Where are we going then, Mum, they said. And I said we were going to Wonderland. It just came out, and as soon as I’d said it I was sorry. What a dumb thing to say, honestly, but I was desperate I suppose. Skye said the only pet she wanted anyway was Loopy, and she whimpered and blubbered off and on for three days and nearly drove me out of my mind. I wanted Loopy too, but there was no way. Try listening to ‘Loooooopy’ day in, day out in the back of the car, not to mention on the ferry and in every McDonald’s and KFC along the highway. But as I say, it only lasted for three days, and then she seemed to get over it. Jake was mostly silent, thank God, but I know he was mourning for Loopy—well, for a lot of things, actually.
People sometimes say that the destination is not as important as the journey. Well I am here to tell you that sometimes it’s the destination that matters, and you can stick the journey up your jumper. Let’s just say it was hell and leave it at that. These days the kids remember it fondly, the junk food, the fly-blown motels, the caravan parks, the wind-blown playgrounds full of plastic bags and broken bottles. Weird, that. But people were kind, you know. I will say that. Although there was the boy that stole Jake’s scooter. Yes, there was him. The hardest thing, actually, was keeping our clothes clean. I was forever looking for laundromats and trying to collect enough coins. And everything came out grey anyway. Mum, Skye would say, Mum, when do we get to Wonderland? It’s a long way, I would say, a long way. But we’ll get there in the end, baby.
And we did.
My friend Gretel was living in Byron with her man of the time. That was Snoddy. She was making bead jewellery and selling it in markets, and Snods was doing huge paintings—mainly tropical flowers—frangipani and hibiscus and so on. Such things were popular at the time with big banks and hotels in the cities, and they were hung on vast marble walls. Snoddy used to sing ‘I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls’. I still see the paintings sometimes, in the odd bank and so forth. I always thought they were hideous, and I still do, but they certainly paid the bills.
So we settled down with Gretel and Snoddy and their various kids. Jake and Skye fitted right in, and I got a job in a wine bar, cleaning and also serving drinks. This is the life, eh Tabbycat, Snoddy would say to me. Aren’t you glad you make the effort? And I was. I put the terrible journey north—it went on forever—behind me, and got into the swing of things in Byron. I got into crystals and Tarot easy as, and into a bit of massage. Snoddy built me a wigwam and I operated fr
om there. One day Skye said to me—I remember this as if it was yesterday—she said, Wonderland is wonderful, Mum. You were right to come here. I love it. And then she hugged me and she said, I love you forever, Mum. We wore flowers in our hair, and the atmosphere was sweet with patchouli and cannabis. The kids went to school in bare feet. Yes, they took to it all like ducks to water. Jake learned to play the bongos, and Skye began the dancing that finally took her to New York. So this was Wonderland.
As I drove by the house on the hill yesterday, it was hard to believe I had done what I had done, broken from my life there at the vineyard. Escaped. I can go over it all in my mind now without really feeling the horror and the fear—horror and chaos every day, fear of the future. The legal battles were to come, as I drove off with the kids from that failed Paradise on the hill.
I suppose it all started when I fell in love with Salv. Yes. And we had a double wedding with his brother Fabio. Wedding bells like that should ring alarm bells, in retrospect. The brothers bought the vineyard and started to build the house on the hill—the famous double house where two families would live together with one fabulous swimming pool and stables for horses—and a vast garage splitting the house in two. That word ‘splitting’. Always watch out for splitting.
Fabio married Anka—Anka with the shining golden hair and wide dreaming aquamarine eyes. She was the great beauty of the district. We were a lovely mixture of Italian, Anglo and Polish. Watch out for ‘mixture’ too. That’s another word. Mixture and splitting and alarm bells. Yes. Anka’s family were holocaust survivors—her mother was one of the babies smuggled out of Poland in a big leather handbag. I thought her married name—Anka Foglieri—was really pretty, whereas mine—Tabitha Foglieri—was kind of a mouthful. Mixture. My mother—as Anglo as they come, and they came pretty Anglo in Tassie in the sixties—believed that the world should somehow resemble the world of Beatrix Potter and, yes, I was named after Tabitha Twitchit, the mother cat in the apron. Everybody used to give me figurines of her—I faithfully collected them for years. In fact I hated them. When I left the vineyard, they stayed behind in the shadow box on the wall of Skye’s old bedroom. I’ve sometimes wondered what became of them. They might be worth a fortune now. Too bad.
Things went well for a few years. We were the envy of the district with a flourishing vineyard and wine label, ‘Tabianka Cellars’, and our great mansion on the hill. The Foglieri Castle—that’s what people called it, the Foglieri Castle. Foglieri Folly more like.
I don’t know when the rows started, but the rot set in, and while the vines flourished, the lives of us two families in the castle started to go to hell. Gretel said she saw it coming long before I did—well, she had her crystal ball up there in Byron. Salv fell in love with Anka, didn’t he. I think, to her credit, that she resisted him for a long time, but in the end Fabio caught them in the cabana and went after Salvatore with a shotgun. He never explained why he was carrying the gun at the time. No—that was never explained. Anyhow, he threatened, didn’t pull the trigger, but it was going to be only a matter of time. The stress of it all actually killed my mother, I reckon. We tried to sort things out—counsellors and priests and lawyers, not to mention the families and friends, but it went from bad to worse and in the end I packed the Pajero and got out. I hardly even planned it. The big casualty at that point was Loopy, but actually he lived a long and happy life with Emily and Tom and their kids. We got another golden lab before too long in Byron, so everyone was happy. Well that sounds kind of neat. Nothing was neat, really, was it, not with everything simmering away at the Foglieri Folly. Simmering? More like doing whatever it is volcanoes do. Salvatore’s dad originally came from Naples, and whenever he got into a temper the family used to call him Vesuvius. Well Vesuvius was about to blow.
While we were settling, or drifting down in Wonderland, there was trouble, naturally, back in Paradise. Big trouble. Fabio did eventually go after Salvatore with the shotgun. He killed him down among the vines very early one crisp morning in spring. ‘Let us get up early to the vineyard’—that’s from the Bible. Then he went up to the house and had a swim. Yes. He was still in the pool when the police came. So Fabio went to jail. Simple. Anka had a complete breakdown. It all worked out like an equation. I had to go back, of course, but when it was all over, Salvatore’s funeral and the trial and so forth, I went back to Byron for good.
It seems strange to tell these terrible facts so bluntly, but they have kind of solidified in my mind, and I trot them out like an old legend or something. My children have no father any more. I have never really spoken to Anka since I left, all those years ago. Of course we’ve had plenty of legal dealings—we sold the house—and we see each other at funerals. I must say she looks very beautiful in black, with lace obscuring her face and her aquamarine eyes gazing sorrowfully out. I do feel sorry for her, yes, I do.
Some people from France, actually, bought the house and the business, and they didn’t change the label because it has been so successful, particularly overseas. So there they are in grog shops all over the world, sparkling glass bottles with a picture of the house on the hill and the vines plaiting their way down the hillside in the sunlight, and the word ‘Tabianka’ scrawled in thick blue handwriting across the middle. Gretel laughs a kind of dark laugh and calls it one of the ironies of the gods. And more ironic is the fact that we can’t usually afford to drink anything as expensive as that, even though we’re doing well. Sometimes we do lash out and have a bottle of Tabianka, though. I thought it would choke me, but it’s so smooth and rich that even I’m completely seduced.
Snoddy eventually went off to live in Perth with a young woman who worked, as it happened, for a bank where they had one of his big flower paintings—it was a waterlily one—nothing like Monet. He dream he dwelt in marble halls. So that left Gretel and me and five kids. The kids have more or less gone now, and that leaves Gretel and me. We have a pretty good business providing massage and aromatherapy to all the big hotels in Byron and points north. My old wigwam is still there out the back.
Well, the drive past the house on the hill, with its sloping carpet of vines, brought it all back to me. It’s all behind me now. Listen to your heart, Gretel used to say—she still does. I listened then and I listen now, and the answer is not difficult to hear. Of course then you have to have the strength to follow your heart, don’t you? That was the hard part—remember Loopy and the laundromats and the broken bottles in the playgrounds. But now there’s Gretel and me, at home in Wonderland. Whatever next, I say, whatever next, and Gretel smiles her enigmatic smile and holds me in her arms and says whatever will be will be.
And I suppose it will.
This Butterfly
Susie Greenhill
They’re not part of a world of numbers or hours. They exist mostly without money. But sometimes Beth sits in underground stations and sings with her guitar, and her eyes are such a pearlescent blue and her voice so clear above the echoing trains that her hat fills quickly, and always before the inspectors do their rounds and ask her to move on. It’s not something she does often, and Miles doesn’t ask her to, despite it being so much more lucrative than begging, because he knows how she hates to be watched in that way. He has seen it himself, sitting as he usually does at the other end of the platform. The doors of the train opening and the eyes—glazed in that city-weary way—lifting from phones and tabloids to her face and her own eyes, fixed on some immeasurable point, or tracing the cracks in the concrete at her feet.
When he thinks back on that night he can see every detail of the station, as though he’d been there with her. He can smell the damp of the tunnels and in the stale air the blended aftershaves and perfumes of the people on the platform, the over-bright fluorescents beating down on woolhats and crimped blonde hair. There’s the stench of the drunk sitting slumped in the corner, and around him that circle of empty space. It’s a space that Miles knows intimately now. It has followed him since the day he left home and it follows Beth too and he
knows for certain it was there around her guitar-case that night, on the otherwise crowded platform. He can feel the wash of icy wind that accompanies the train. The doors are slow to open and he can see the eyes of the commuters turning towards the front where they imagine the faceless driver must be; the pin-tucked suits at the edge of the platform stepping forward to try the buzzers again.
When the doors finally open, among the grey, a crowd of football fans spill out of the carriage close to Beth. They have open cans of lager and their sweating faces are painted red. For a moment her singing disappears under their chanting. But she wouldn’t have stopped, he knows this for certain. She would have kept singing, her voice no more audible than a whisperbelow the rush of the departing train.
‘Flicker-flicker-flicker-flicker here you are…’
The people on the edge of the empty space hear her. They push back their head-sets and though they keep walking and never stray into the space their faces seem to alter, grow still.
He doesn’t know when it was that she realised he was late, and he wonders if she watched the clock above the stairs between songs and how long she might have waited. He can picture the uncertainty growing on her face, and hear the quiver of distraction as it entered her voice. He can see her settling the small guitar into its cigarette-burned case, and emptying the money she has earned into the pocket of her coat. The passengers in the carriages still watch her, through the windows, as they cling to the overhead hand-holds, their bodies swaying in awkward symmetry as the train starts to move. He’ll never know if it was someone who had followed her from there, or if it was someone who had noticed her later, as she made her way back to the squat in the dark. All he can see is himself in the bookshop and the woman behind the counter starting to lock up and him running to the station and a guard on the gate and the escalators blocked.