Foreign Soil
Page 21
“Doo wappa wappa, doo wappa, doo doo wap.” Maryam’s joining in now, swaying her hips from side to side, clapping her hands together so the trapped water makes a splat noise.
Markie’s tap-dancing in the water now. It’s splashing through the small gap beneath the shower door and onto the floor mat. He might slip. His head could go through the shower screen. He might fall on his sister and split her lip. We don’t have a bath and the owners won’t be in a hurry to fix the shower if it breaks. It took them three months to see to replacing the bolt on the front door.
But they are dancing, the two of them, twisting and swaying their small brown bodies under the shower-rain, faces upturned and singing Duke Ellington, Maryam’s voice completely out of tune, joyously off harmony. I raise myself to my feet, stand in the hallway just out of sight, peering in at the two children. They laugh, shake the water from their faces, drum on their tummies, go unashamedly ragtime.
* * *
Avery straightens her legs. She can’t hold on any longer, feels herself sliding toward the ground, braces herself for the fall. She wonders what it will feel like, the playground bark splintering in her head, her neck jarring on impact. Halfway to the ground her body flips suddenly, bending at the waist. Avery gasps, somersaults, lands somehow, both feet facing forward, arms swung out in front of her like the gymnastic girls she and her mum watched together on telly last year when the Olympics were on. Avery pauses a moment in shock. Laughs out loud, flushed cheeks almost bursting. She did it. She looks around the playground, still astonished, then runs off toward her classroom.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my family: Claudette, Syreeta, Mike, Braden, Mali, Maya, and Ayana. Thank you to Silvano Giordano, with whom I started this journey twenty-three years ago, rewriting Playing Beatie Bow while listening to Prince. Thank you to Jeff Sparrow and David Ryding, who gave me rope even when the waters became rocky and who believed, way back before anyone else did. To the fellow students and teaching staff of the Faculty of Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong, in particular Merlinda Bobis, Alan Wearne, Anthony Macris, and John Hawke, for pouring petrol on the flame. To the Law Faculty at the University of Wollongong, for the scholarship that gave me the educational means to financially support my writing until it grew to support itself. Thank you to Alice Pung, Catherine Deveny, Tony Birch, and Randa Abdel-Fattah, for being generous and enthusiastic first readers. Thank you to the Melbourne Spoken Word community, my chosen artistic kin. To my editors, Robert Watkins and Kate Stevens, and to Anna Hayward, Fiona Hazard, Matt Richell, Justin Ractliffe, Kelly Morton, and the entire Hachette Australia family, for adopting me so wholeheartedly. Thanks also to Clara Finlay and Eloise Oxer, for their respective editing and scribing expertise on Foreign Soil, and Allison Colpoys for the breathtaking cover design. Thank you to my agent, Tara Wynne, at Curtis Brown Australia, who held the flashlight and the cutlass but let me lead the way. Thank you to Nicholas Walton-Healey, whose lens truly sees.
Foreign Soil was the winning manuscript of the 2013 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, and I would like to thank the Wheeler Centre and the Victoria State Government for sponsoring and administering the award. This award was instrumental in finding a publisher for this collection. I would particularly like to pay tribute to the 2013 judges, Paddy O’Reilly, Sam Twyford-Moore, and Francesca Rendle-Short who, in selecting Foreign Soil, made the bravest and most unexpected of decisions where others may well not have. Several stories in this collection, or previous incarnations of these works, were first published elsewhere: “Shu Yi” appeared in short form in Peril. “Harlem Jones” was shortlisted for the 2012 Overland Victoria University Short Story Prize, and was first published in Overland. “Hope” was published in extract in Page Seventeen, and “Railton Road” first appeared in Harvest magazine. Foreign Soil is dedicated to Australian fiction writers of color: those who paved the path before me, and those for whom these clumsy feet will hopefully help smooth the way.
About the Author
Maxine Beneba Clarke is a widely published Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent and author of the poetry collections Gil Scott Heron is on Parole (Picaro Press, 2009) and Nothing Here Needs Fixing (Picaro Press, 2013). As a spoken word performer, Maxine’s work has been delivered on stages and airwaves, and at festivals across Australia. Her short fiction, essays, and poetry have been published in numerous publications, including Meanjin, Overland, The Age, Big Issue, Cordite Poetry Review, Mascara, Harvest, Voiceworks, Going Down Swinging, Unusual Work, and Peril.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Maxine Beneba Clarke
Originally published in Australia in 2014 by Hachette Australia
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-5011-3636-8
ISBN 978-1-5011-3637-5 (ebook)