by Terri Janke
‘You gotta be joking,’ says Mike, looking at the others and laughing.
Clarissa comes to stand next to me. ‘What’s wrong, afraid you’ll be beaten?’
‘Right, you’re on.’ Mike waves to the other boys to get behind him.
It was Dad who taught us to play soccer. How to pass the ball, kick through the goal, and do tricks like the shepherd and the step-over pass. Sometimes we play against my brother’s schoolmates. We know we’re good.
I place my thongs as goal markers. Clarissa tucks her wraparound skirt in her underpants. At kick-off my brother is quick to steal the ball. ‘Here, Tarena.’ He passes to me and I put a long and fast one into goal. We are leading by three goals when the game ends.
‘This is stupid,’ says one boy after he fails to stop yet another goal. The boys leave and take their ball with them.
‘Not bad for girls,’ Mike yells back to us.
‘But I’m not a girl,’ Shane calls out.
We laugh all the way home.
When it’s time for the soccer trials, Dad buys my brother a pair of football boots and Mum knits him knee-high, black-and-yellow socks with white soles.
‘Doesn’t he look cute?’ says the coach’s wife at the trials. I think Shane looks like a cartoon character. His legs are like a stick insect’s.
‘Why can’t I play too?’ I ask my father.
‘Girls don’t play proper soccer.’
‘But I know how to play and I play with the boys all the time.’
‘That’s different – that’s only mucking around.’ Dad is looking intently at the players on the field.
‘But why?’
‘Competition soccer is only for boys.’
My brother slides across the grass to block a goal.
‘Go, Shane, go!’ Dad yells proudly. Shane stands up to show off the fresh grass stains on his new white shorts. He’s got nothing to worry about. Already the coach is looking at him and smiling.
After the trials, we wait to hear who made the team. A few boys are kicking a ball around. I join in, shuffling my feet, attempting to steal the ball from one of the boys. He pushes me. I push him back and we wrestle to the ground. My hand forms a fist and I go to punch his face, hitting his shoulder instead. He turns to slap me back but is interrupted.
‘Here’s Coach with the team,’ Shane calls.
Shane has been selected to play striker, the position that gets to score the goals. Dad pats him on the head.
‘Congratulations, Shane,’ I say.
‘Thanks, Tarena. You can still play muck-around games,’ he offers.
‘No thanks, I’ve got other things to do.’
I run up the hill, singing louder than the distant cheers. I laze on the soft grass, lying on my back, my face towards the sun, making animal shapes out of clouds.
light wings
Cairns, 1992
I walk into Albermay’s with a folder under my arm. My mother accompanies me, striding in and looking around to see who else is there. The shop is empty. In the centre is a glass cabinet. On a black velvet pad under a small purple light sits the butterfly brooch. We look intently at it.
The first thing that strikes me is the shape of the butterfly, its head a pearl. The pearl, deformed while growing, is stuck to the lip of the shell. The wings are almost symmetrical. There is intricate etching on the wings. The light plays with the brooch’s texture, making it seem as if a hundred different colours are moving in it. From the photograph in the paper, I had imagined something smaller, but the butterfly brooch is as large as the palm of my hand.
My mother plucks a tissue from her bag. ‘That’s it.’ She wipes her eyes.
The woman at the counter walks towards us. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Hello, my name is Tarena Shaw. We’d like to have a closer look at the butterfly brooch.’
‘I couldn’t let you look at it today. That’s a very expensive piece we’re about to auction.’
‘I’d like to speak to the manager.’
‘I am the manager.’
‘Then we’d like to speak with Mr Albermay,’ I say.
‘Mr Albermay is not here.’ The woman breathes out with a sigh. ‘Look, the brooch is a hand-crafted relic. A part of the Nash estate, which is due for auction next week. Mrs Cynthia Nash, Doctor Nash’s daughter, is the controller of the estate. She’s put all the doctor’s cultural artefacts up for aution.’
My mother taps two fingers on the counter. ‘Artefact! That’s not an artefact, it’s part of our family’s heritage. You can’t sell that butterfly. It doesn’t belong to the Nash estate. He stole that brooch. It belongs to us. It was my mother’s.’
The woman behind the counter raises one hand to rub the back of her neck.
I hand over the document I drafted the night before. ‘My client alleges that this brooch belongs to her, to our, I mean her family. We intend to file proceedings against Albermay’s and the Nash estate if the sale continues.’ I make myself stand tall. ‘I suggest you tell Mr Albermay to contact his lawyers. I intend to file this in the court later today. Tell Mr Albermay that I am filing a court application to stop the sale of the brooch.’
‘What on earth?’ She is shaking her arms; the gold bangles rattle. ‘Get out of here.’
We leave the store, but I am walking on very shaky legs.
‘You did good, honey,’ says my mother. ‘We gave them the chance to hand it over, now we’ve got to go to the court.’
I can’t believe I am facing the possibility of going to court. I’ve never even done a moot at university. What am I supposed to say in court? But I can’t tell my mother that, she’s on a mission.
snail in a bottle
Sydney, 1991
In my fourth year at law school, someone scratched ‘abo’ into the wall near the Aboriginal Students Centre. It was a deep etch at first. Once the cleaners had scrubbed and scrubbed, the letters receded, but their weight was too heavy to silence the scar. I looked at the faces of the students around me, searching for the person, man or woman, who had taken the effort and time to dig those three letters into the plaster. But all I could see was the freckly face of a primary-school boy. The fat one who used to wait at the corner when I got off the bus, calling me that name over and over as I walked home.
‘They think we get special treatment because we’re black,’ says Jessie, putting her bag on the chair.
‘What are you talking about?’ I ask her.
‘The other students think we get it too easy. They think we’re lucky. Lucky to be here with the cream of society.’
‘Well, just you be a good little blackie and toe the line,’ I jest.
Jessie forces a laugh and I leave to go to class.
I walk into the classroom ten minutes late. There are no seats free except right under the lecturer’s nose. Reluctantly I make my way down to the front.
‘Well, Tarena, you’ve decided to join us,’ says the lecturer, looking out from her silver glasses. ‘We’re just going over the case of Donoghue versus Stevenson. Would you inform the class of the facts of the case?’
I’m flicking through my textbook, trying to find the case, to maybe learn about it in a split second, through the touch of my fingertips. No luck.
‘Ms Shaw?’
‘I’m sorry, I haven’t done the reading.’
‘Well, that’s a poor start. You can’t expect to pass law school if you don’t do the reading. Will someone else be so good as to tell us the facts?’
The hand of an eager student rises. ‘A woman bought a bottle of ginger beer and found a decomposed snail at the bottom of it.’ My pen moves quickly across the faint lines of my lecture pad.
After class, as everyone leaves, I overhear a conversation at the back of the room.
‘Hey, Johnno, what did the Aborigine say when he found a snail at the bottom of his can of drink?’
‘Do you have any cans with witchetty grubs?’
I can smell chalk dust as I stuff the thick tex
tbook into my bag.
flowers
Cairns, 1978
The frangipani is a flower of the tropics. It reminds me of summer and the hot, humid air of Cairns. The smell is sweet. The soft edges are light and make me float on the crest of a dream. It is a dream of my youth.
Submerging the flowers in a bucket of cool water, I would make perfume. I would dab my sweet-smelling frangipani perfume on the back of my sweating legs, and my skin would be cool.
When I was a girl I would peel the flowers, petal by petal. If I felt like dancing, I would wear them in my hair. When they fell to the ground I would lie on them, wrap them around me. I would take them inside and put them in a bowl next to me while I slept. I’d wake up to find them shrivelled: time to go outside and get more. But one morning I saw that a branch had snapped. It hung loosely and white sap flowed from the grey limbs.
‘The tree is crying,’ I told my mother.
‘It will heal. Don’t worry. We can grow another tree from that branch.’
We went outside and she cut off the branch. The sap dripped like milk. We planted the branch in a pot.
‘We can plant it in the ground later,’ Mum said.
‘It’s like the tree’s had a baby.’
‘Sort of.’ Mum wasn’t convinced.
‘You know that story you told me about the woman who turned into a frangipani tree waiting for her boyfriend? This tree is like that. It can keep going and grow another tree from part of its own branch.’
‘That’s why these trees grow in a lot of places, I guess,’ Mum said.
‘Can we make this a home for the butterflies too?’
‘Sure we can, but give the tree time to grow now.’
mum listens to music
Canberra, 1985
I see her silhouette. She sits on the brown velour lounge we got from the Big W store. The cigarette glows red, like the waiting eye of an animal in the dark. Shirley Bassey sings. There is static on the record because it’s my mother’s favourite album. She has played it a hundred times and she only bought it last month.
‘Mum, are you still up?’ I turn on the light.
‘Just listening to music.’ Her hands cover her eyes. ‘Turn the light out.’
I flick up the switch but linger near the doorway.
I check the pineapple clock in the hall. It’s past midnight. My father is not home yet. I walk closer as Mum puts out her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. I bend down to kiss her cheek, bury my face in her shoulder. ‘Happy birthday, Mum.’
‘Thanks, love.’ She scratches my head with her long fingernails. ‘Your mother’s getting old, darling. Forty today.’ She stops for a few seconds. ‘That’s older than my mother was when she died.’ She plays with my hair. ‘My mother used to sing me this song. When I was a little girl I would listen to her sing it.’
She sings along with Shirley, who is belting out the words. As Mum sings, I imagine her as a young child. There is a photograph of her at the age of five or six, sitting on the grass. When I look at the photograph I see her eyes first.
‘I miss Cairns,’ she says. ‘I want to go back.’
‘But what about Dad?’
‘He likes it here, but he’s never home.’
The song ends. Mum gets up to start it again. She lifts the record-player arm carefully, pulling it back to the first track. ‘Go to bed now, love.’
I kiss her again, and leave as she lights another cigarette and pours the last of the green bottle into her glass.
Later, I lie in the blanketed night trying to think of what she feels, trying to feel what she thinks.
From then on, my parents grow further and further apart. I feel like I have been torn in two.
a family recipe
Cairns, 1992
My mother teaches me how to cook a family recipe. She fusses around the kitchen. ‘My mother Francesca taught me to cook this when I was a girl.’ She cuts the onion in a crisscross, then smashes garlic cloves with the back of a knife. Her fingers peel the ginger and she cuts it into two pieces. On the shelf above the stove is an egg-timer in the shape of a chicken. Its beak is broken. (‘I didn’t break it. Shane did it, Mum!’) I can hear the ticking of the pineapple clock.
‘Mum, where did you live after your father died?’
‘We moved from place to place, with relatives and friends. Then my mother found us a home. It was an old warehouse – one room was the kitchen, and a separate room where we all slept. She taught me how to cook when I was about five years old.’ Mum moves towards the stove. I hear the sizzle of the food in the pan and the aroma rises quickly.
‘Mum, you know you’re going to have to be a witness if we get to argue the case in court?’ I say.
‘I’m not worried about that. I’m ready to fight for what’s mine.’
She tears the chicken into pieces, breaking the bones, which are like the plastic limbs of a doll. ‘This is the way my mother taught me to pull a chicken apart. We used to keep them, you know. My father would chop off their heads and my mother would pluck out the feathers, then hang them by their legs. It was my job to put the feathers in a bag.’ She places the pieces in the pan.
‘It’s hot in here,’ I say, wiping my face with a paper towel.
‘You pour in the soy sauce, but you must use this brand.’ She holds up a colourful, tall bottle. ‘You get it at the Chinese grocer. Those other brands are watered down. Many of us Murris cook this dish, but each family has a different method,’ she tells me, replacing the yellow lid on the bottle. ‘Some people add water chestnuts and dried-up mushrooms, but not in our family. We cook it this way.’ She scrapes a diced tomato off the cutting board with her knife and adds clear vermicelli to the pan. It has been soaking in hot water for two minutes. ‘That’s it,’ she says. ‘Now pass me some sherry.’
‘Is it for the cooking?’ I ask.
‘No, it’s for the cook.’ She fills her glass. ‘Pass me the rice.’ Her hands shake under the cool stream of water from the tap as she washes the rice. She fills another saucepan with water. ‘Water up to the second mark of your longest finger. Turn it up high, but don’t stir it, that’s whitefella way. You wait for the water to boil down and then put the lid on. Steam it up real soft and fluffy.’ She taps the wooden spoon against the saucepan’s edge. I set the table.
‘We can have it with my chilli sauce, and Uncle Tally’s mango chutney.’
Many people say that my mother is a good cook. A crafty cook, the type that can make a meal out of a can of corned meat and a few potatoes. Mum is addicted to rice. She has rice for breakfast with milk and sugar. She has rice for lunch with cold meat, chilli and soy sauce. She eats rice with fish and rice with pork.
I think of Serge’s kitchen in Sydney. I think of how he guards the stainless-steel benches, the wall oven and the terrazzo tiles. Serge hides his recipe notes, but we all know he has taken them from cookery books written by other people. My mother’s favourite recipe is not written down on paper, it’s in her head.
if cairns were a movie
Cairns, 1992
I ring the Cairns Tropical News. The woman who answers puts me on hold. I wait five minutes. She comes back to tell me that the journalist who wrote the article about the butterfly brooch is away for the day.
‘She’s gone to Cooktown. She’ll be back tomorrow.’
‘I was after a copy of the photograph,’ I say.
‘I’ll put you through to image sales.’ Another two minutes on hold, then someone else answers.
‘Hello, images,’ says a voice.
‘Can I order a photograph?’ I ask, and give her the details.
‘Sorry, we didn’t take that one. It was given to us by the jewellery store. But we’ve got some copies at reception. Mr Albermay left them for interested callers. I’ll put you back to reception.’
Great. Did the woman on reception know this before she put me through to images? In any case, my persistence pays off. They will hold a copy for me and I can pick it up th
is afternoon. Another piece in the evidence jigsaw.
I stop at the newsagent on the corner to buy some supplies. At the front, near the counter, is a rack of glossy postcards. I pick up a picture of a sunset scene at the Esplanade. I consider buying it to send to Jessie. It’s hard to make out any landmarks.
Cairns never looks as good in postcards as it really is. If Cairns were a painting, it would be an abstract swirl of red, blue and purple, with a childhood yellow claiming one corner of the canvas. If it were a person, it would be an old wise woman with big breasts that sag from years of nurturing children. She’d be an experienced old girl, with a wild past that she keeps pushing behind her. If Cairns were a movie, it would be in cinemascope, that old style with the bar at the top and the bottom. I can hear the soundtrack and see the trailer – I can even see the poster and I want to hang it above my bed back in Sydney.
But I don’t want to be part of the pictures on these postcards. The two-dimensional images don’t tell the true story. I put the card back in the rack and spin the revolving stand.
How am I going to prove that Kit carved the pearl-shell butterfly? I have the testimony of Horatio Hondu from Thursday Island. Mum is going to testify. But how exactly am I going to prove ownership? It’s not like I can just produce a receipt. And Mrs Nash-Hill has possession of the butterfly; they say possession is nine-tenths of the law. I remember my property law, all those principles about chattels. What a funny word to describe ‘possessions other than land’. And the finders-keepers law comes to mind. What about the nemo dat rule? Something about the owner only getting as good a title as is given.
I head to the library and find a textbook on property law. It says:
The title to property is relative. The absolute owner of a chattel has a title that is good against the whole world. Generally, when the absolute owner transfers the possession of the chattel to another person, this new person possesses a title as good as, but subject to, the owner’s. Hence, the possessor’s title is relative to the owner’s. When possession or ownership of a chattel is transferred from one party to another, the transferee receives no better title than the transferor. This principle is called the nemo dat quod non habet rule.