Foreign Soil

by Maxine Beneba Clarke

  Avery concentrates hard, sends the mind map out toward the school office. She wouldn’t even mind if it was the principal who came. Ms. Lothian is a tall, unsmiling lady with cold gray eyes who reminds Avery of the nasty headmistress in Matilda.

  Avery’s mum gave her a copy of Matilda the afternoon of the accident. The new book had been lying on the backseat when Avery got in the car after school. It was in her hands when they screeched through the roundabout. She had already opened the front cover.

  When Avery woke up in the hospital after the crash, the Roald Dahl book was lying on her bedside table. Avery wishes she was Matilda now, and she could close her eyes and use her brainiac magic to whirl the playground bark up into a small mountain underneath her. Then she would gently touch her fingertips to the mountain and ease herself off the bars. She would climb down the bark mountain and go and get a drink from the bubblers. Avery is beginning to feel thirsty. She runs her tongue over her bottom lip. Her right thigh is turning numb.

  * * *

  I shuffle back on the bed a little, away from the window. The stifling evening has started to cool, but there are several rush-hour services to pass by before I can open the apartment up properly. On still nights like these, the wind-rush of passing trains carries all the way up to the bedroom windows. The roaring and heaving puts both kids on edge.

  The ABC Kids channel is still blaring from the lounge room, but aside from the mellow version of “On the Night Watch” Jimmy Giggle is crooning with his owl puppet friend, the apartment’s oddly quiet: a rare gap in the roaring and shaking, a breath in the growling thunderstorm that is Footscray Station. Crisscrossed steel train lines glint in the early evening light, hum and keen, bracing themselves for another arrival.

  Jimmy Giggle is mourning the end of a magical day, welcoming the arrival of the moon in a soothing melody designed to entice sleep.

  A high-pressure pop sounds, like a plug being pulled from a full sink: Maryam removing her thumb from her mouth. She will have hurled aside her filthy crocheted comfort blanket and leaped to her feet.

  “And bright da day to a bwand true way . . .” She sings along spiritedly in wavering falsetto to the last few lines of the lullaby.

  Jimmy Giggle will be freshly dressed for bed in his bright yellow owl pajamas, swaying from side to side with extended jazz fingers, smiling that odd wide grin of his. Maryam’s big brown eyes will be following him in adoration.

  The rumbling outside grows closer, louder, closer still, until the bedroom floor shakes. The walls vibrate for several seconds. The headlights of the train, already glaring though darkness has not yet fallen, beam orange light into the bedroom: two glowing circles that dance faintly across the wall as the train swerves past. The Watergardens to City rambles away toward South Kensington Station in a rush of white noise, the driver sounding the horn three times as he slides the beast out of Footscray Station.

  This place was supposed to be temporary. A month, maybe three, I told the owner when I found the apartment online through Gumtree. Single mother. Two small children. Freelance income. After a month of rejections, I’d had to go off the real estate grid. Again. It’s been almost a year now. Long enough to be home. Between the three of us, we can recognize almost every evening train by speed, sound, and character. Each driver has their mark. The captain of the 5:36 Watergardens to City is always flamboyant like this in announcing his departure.

  “I hate that driver. Why does he always have to honk like that?” Markie’s standing at the bedroom door, knotted mass of curly black Afro curl haloing his head, one leg of his navy school tracksuit pants hiked up around his knee, the other hanging full length.

  “You don’t hate that driver. You don’t even know him. He might annoy you, but that’s different from hate.”

  “I hate that driver. And I hate being bored. And bored is what I am right now.”

  “I thought you were reading your book.”

  A paperback copy of Captain Underpants is hanging from his right hand, his thumb wedged in to keep his place. Markie shrugs. “The book’s boring me. I want to watch television.”

  “Isn’t the television already on?”

  “It’s Giggle and Hoot,” he says pointedly.

  “So?”

  “I’m too old for Giggle and Hoot.”

  “Giggle and Hoot is universal entertainment. Nobody’s too old for Giggle and Hoot!”

  He rolls his eyes, walks into the room, dives onto the bed next to me. “Anyway, you said Jimmy Giggle laughs like he’s high as a kite.”

  “What? I did not. When did I say that?”

  “I heard you say it the other day, to Alice’s mum. And high as a kite,” he looks over at me sternly, “means on drugs.”

  “What do you know about drugs anyway?”

  “Nothing. Drugs are bad. Miss Walton said so. I don’t want to talk about drugs. I just want to watch television. Can I—”

  The 5:41 Werribee to Flinders screams in, drowning the end of Markie’s sentence. He has become patient with the punctuation of howling freight trains, inured to the crude and untimely interruptions of the whooshing cross-country V/Line services. When he hears a train approaching he closes his eyes for several seconds to block out the flash. It’s become an impulse, really: a body brace, a tic. Markie talks a little too enthusiastically, as if constantly straining above engine noise. In his December school report the teacher recommended a hearing test. There is nothing wrong with his hearing that could not be fixed by a change of address.

  Maryam has been having nightmares. At five o’clock every morning, a fire-breathing dragon looks into the window of the small bedroom she shares with her brother. It licks its swollen silver lips and glares at her with glowing yellow eyes. She will not believe it’s just a brand-new eight-carriage Metro electric: an early-morning train lurching so far and fast toward our building that flying off the rails and slamming through the café below always seems a distinct possibility.

  “I hate these trains. I want to go back to our old place. At least it was quiet there.”

  * * *

  Avery can’t pull herself up. She strains for a few seconds to grab the monkey-bar rung with her fingers, but she can’t quite reach it and lets her arms hang helplessly again.

  Metal garbage cans are peppered around the playground. There’s a can only a few meters from where Avery hangs, just outside the bark-covered play area. A wasp buzzes around the small hole in the lid. From where she’s hanging, Avery can smell the half-eaten sandwiches sweating in the summer heat. The garbage can smells like her fridge at home when her dad hasn’t emptied it for a while.

  Avery does not want to fall. She saw her dad split his head open once. There was a big crack that sounded like a hard cricket ball being smashed against a wooden bat, then blood so thick and red it didn’t look real, matted all through the front of his sandy-colored hair. It was after her mum’s funeral and everybody had come to their house to drink lots of wine and eat the delicious soft chicken-and-avocado sandwiches her auntie Tina had made. It was like a party, only everybody was sad. Avery’s dad had drunk too much wine and started talking funny. He’d come over and sat next to her on the couch in their lounge room.

  “It’s just you and me now, kid,” he’d said, in a slow voice like he was about to fall asleep. “We’ll be okay. We’ll be fine. No worries, kid.” Then he’d got up from the chair and swayed into the kitchen. As he reached for the fridge handle he’d slipped on the tiles somehow. There’s still a dent in the fridge door, where his skull hit.

  Avery stares down at the bark. If she falls, she might not crack her head, but she will definitely hurt herself. A tear rolls from the corner of her eye, down her forehead, into her hair.

  * * *

  Avery is stuck upside down, and for the life of me I cannot figure out what to do with her next.

  There could be a man, standing just outside the wire fence of the schoolyard. Both hands might be wedged deep inside his pockets as he stares at the little
girl hanging upside down in the empty playground with her dress bunched around her waist. Perhaps he is not supposed to come within eight hundred meters of a childcare center or a school.

  The laptop screen flickers. Threads of static crackle across it. If the computer goes, I’m screwed. The bills have been reshuffled and extended. I click to save, and Microsoft asks me to name the document. I pause. This story is not going to be sent out, in any case. Most likely never even completed. Certainly not published and read. Because Avery is hanging upside down, and it will all end in tragedy. The only way down is for a scared little girl to hurt herself. I do not know how to rescue Avery gently.

  Slotted into the emerald-green milk crate that I use for a bedside table are printouts of seven very nice, very separate rejection e-mails. They are from different publishing houses, but could actually have been written by the same person. They are curled into paper scrolls, slotted into the diamond-shaped holes of the crate, like echidna spines, literary armor. We are enamored of your writing. Your prose is startlingly poetic. We have not seen work like this for quite some time. Please could you send some more of your writing, maybe on a different theme. Or is there anything else you’re currently working on?

  Your writing is genuinely astonishing, but I’d like to read something you’ve written that deals with more everyday themes. Work that has an uplifting quality. Ordinary moments. Think book club material. I’d be happy to have a conversation about this if you’re interested. I may be able to point you in the direction of the kind of stories I mean. Unfortunately, we feel Australian readers are just not ready for characters like these.

  The title character in “Harlem Jones.” What can I say? He’s intriguing—so raw. But what if he didn’t hurl the Molotov in the closing paragraphs? Imagine if that day of the Tottenham riots was ultimately a wake-up call that got an angry black kid back on the straight and narrow? We would be very interested in working with you to bring some light to this collection with a view to discussing its potential publication. These are very minor edits we are talking about. We hope you would be open to this.

  Before the song became “Sukiyaki,” it was “Ue o Muite Arukou”: “I Shall Walk Looking Up.”

  I have hung Avery wrong side up, alone and afraid. I was not going to do this again. When I first started writing, hers was going to be a story about love.

  “Mum!” Markie’s standing by my desk now, pulling at my arm.

  “Just a second. I just have to save this. Or it might disappear.” Poor Avery is already almost invisible.

  I ease myself up from the wooden kitchen chair that doubles uncomfortably as my desk chair, step into the narrow hallway and stand at the door of the lounge room. Markie follows me, stops and stares smugly at his sister. Maryam is sitting on her Kmart baby lounge, clutching her blanket, thumb jammed into her mouth. She looks over at us for a second, then back at the television screen.

  “We’re changing the channel,” Markie declares, striding into the lounge room.

  Maryam slides her thumb out of her mouth. “But I’m watching Giggle and Hoot.”

  “Jimmy Giggle,” Markie says, “is on drugs.”

  “Markie!”

  Maryam stares at her brother, as if assessing his claim. “I don’t care. I like Jimmy Giggle. I’m watching it.”

  Markie moves over to the coffee table, grabs the remote control.

  “If you change the channel, Markie,” says Maryam, “I will be very angry.”

  Markie pauses, glances at me. Lately, his sister has been taking the terrible twos to a whole new level: stiffening her body and trembling as if undergoing electric shock therapy, howling with despair at the slightest inconvenience.

  “Come and help me make some Milo in the kitchen, Maryam. You can stir the Milo powder in, if you like.”

  “No.”

  “I’m changing the channel now,” Markie declares again.

  “You are not changing the channel. Jimmy Giggle is my friend.”

  * * *

  Avery is crying, upside down on the monkey bars. The other children have all gone back to class. They left her there at the end of recess. But not on purpose. They just forgot. The bell went and they stampeded back into their classrooms. Nobody looked back and saw. One moment Avery was sitting on top of the monkey-bar rung, easing herself slowly upside down for the first time in her life, not sure if the dizziness was from the sudden blood rush to her head or from the sheer triumph of the feat. Next, the bell had rung and all the other children had quickly disappeared. Avery hadn’t thought to sing out for help. She is used to being a little bit ignored. Sometimes at home, her dad doesn’t even seem to realize she is there.

  “You’re the spitting image of yer mum, y’know,” Mr. Matthews, who lives next door, said to her a few weeks ago. He whispered it over the fence while she was playing with her grip-ball set in the backyard and he was out watering his precious gardenias. “That’s mostly why he can’t stand looking at yer. Don’t take it to heart, little love.”

  Avery wishes Mr. Matthews was here now. He might be an old man, but she saw him hack up half a tree for firewood last winter. He raised the heavy axe high above his head, swung it fiercely, like he was Superman or something. Mr. Matthews would be strong enough to get her down.

  * * *

  “Right. Nobody is watching television. You kids have had enough for one night. It’s time you both had a shower anyway. Off. Now.”

  “But I don’t like showers. I only like watching Giggle and Hoot.”

  “Mum said turn it off.”

  “No.”

  “Maryam! Jimmy’s on drugs!”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, both of you, will you just quit it for a minute? The television is going off. See? There. End of. Markie, of course he’s not on drugs, and if you mention drugs one more time I will confiscate your Captain Underpants book. Though I hear it’s pretty boring anyway, so you clearly won’t mind. C’mon. Shower time. Both of you.”

  The bathroom’s small, only a few feet bigger than the actual shower cubicle, with a tiny porcelain sink, small metal towel rail, and a mirrored cabinet mounted on the wall. I shuffle in sideways, turn on the shower’s hot water tap, wait till it warms up, turn on the cold.

  “First one into the shower gets ice cream when they get out!” There’s only four spoonfuls left at the bottom of the blue plastic tub, but it will be enough to share between them if I throw a spoonful of Milo powder on top.

  The hallway outside the bathroom is a sudden blur of shirtsleeves, discarded socks and tangled pant legs. Markie squeezes under my arm, steps into the shower with his Spider-Man underpants and one sock still on.

  “Markie!”

  “What?”

  “You’ve still got clothes on.”

  “You didn’t say we had to take them off. What flavor ice cream do I get?”

  “It’s not fair. It’s not fair. Markie’s being bad. Markie still has got his sock on! And he’s bigger than me. I don’t like showers.” Maryam has thrown herself down on the gray carpet in the hallway and is flinging her chubby brown arms about and howling.

  “Oh, stop it. Just get in the shower. You’ll get some ice cream too.”

  The waterworks cease immediately. She wipes her eyes with the backs of her hands. Her green BONDS tank top is bunched around her middle. She rolls it down over her legs and steps out of it, squeezes into the shower next to her brother, squinting and flinching as the warm spray hits her face. “I don’t like water in my face.”

  I hand them both a washcloth, slide the shower door shut, grab my laptop from the desk in my room and settle myself on the hallway floor, back against the wall, computer balanced on my knees.

  * * *

  Avery is crying now, properly. Those first few tears have turned into distraught sobs. Avery’s little chest heaves. She tries to clamp her knees tighter around the monkey bar to stop herself from falling.

  * * *

  For a few minutes, the apartment falls silent again. Th
e children stand under the shower, staring down at their tiny grublike terra-cotta toes, calmed by the streams of warm water running down their backs. Then Markie remembers how much he likes singing in the shower.

  “Doo wah, doo wah. Doo wah, doo wah.”

  “It is remarkable,” the junior choir teacher at Footscray City Primary School once cornered me, “how a child of his age knows rhythm.”

  There is no reason for Markie not to breathe notation. He is a child of changes, gaps and relocations, of rumbling and shaking, of constant sound and frequent movement. A child of whistles and boom gates and signals.

  Rhythmic splashing echoes through the bathroom door, wet thudding in time to the off-key singing.

  “Markie, how many times have I told you, darling? No dancing in the shower. It’s dangerous. Especially with your sister in there with you.”

  “What . . . melody . . . what . . . music . . . possessing something . . .” “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” He’s crooning Ellington, singing about the soul of the music, the uselessness of a melody without a soul.

  The Footscray Primary choir mistress is in love with Duke Ellington. From the back wall of her music room, a caramel-faced portrait leans in, hair gelled back black and shiny from his baby face, pencil-thin mustache hovering above that come-hither grin. The junior choir, Markie included, are happy beneficiaries of her impeccable taste.

  Markie’s deep in the tune now, drawling the words in true Ellington style, warbling about giving everything he has to the rhythm.

  I set the laptop aside, lever myself up on my knees, peer around the door and through the foggy shower screen.