Of Ashes and Rivers that Run to the Sea

by Marie Munkara

  I’ve brought my own kitchen utensils, plates, cutlery etc. because there aren’t any here, as well as some nice tablecloths so I’m not eating directly off the floor. My pride and joy is an electric frying pan. I’ve never used one of these before and I peruse my new cookbooks in search of recipes that can be adapted to this culinary marvel. I didn’t know how to cook before, I just bought food that didn’t need extravagant preparation, or ate out, so there is a certain amount of fear and excitement about having to fend for myself. So far I’ve worked out that I can toast sandwiches in the frying pan, heat up baked beans and cook eggs. I won’t starve.

  I spend the day scrubbing the kitchen and neatly place all my things by themselves on a shelf so everyone can see they belong to me, and then I have a well-earnt nap. I sleep soundly and wake up to the smells of cooking. Stretching and yawning I make my way to the kitchen to put on the billy for tea only to stop at the doorway in horror, my mouth still open from the yawn. The room in an absolute shithole of a mess. My stuff is strewn everywhere, the frying pan has the remains of something burnt, brown and unrecognisable stuck to it and my Wiltshire all-purpose kitchen knife has the tip broken off it. My billy with the spout has disappeared completely along with all my cups, wooden spoons and some of the cutlery and plates. The spatula is poking out of a hole in the flyscreen and the lid is missing from my teapot which is lying on the floor. My box of food has been decimated. Herbal teas have been trodden into the floor, tinned staples of baked beans, spaghetti and ham that I gave mummy money to buy from the store when they went over earlier in the day have been eaten and the empty cans discarded. The loaf of bread has had two big mouthfuls bitten out of it and been dumped straight onto the benchtop without going back into its wrapper. There is a large cockroach sitting smugly on the corner of it washing its antennae while a trail of ants march over it on their way from a bag of sugar to their nest.

  My bloodcurdling screams bring everyone running and they crowd through the kitchen doorway, their faces registering alarm as they look around to see the source of my horror.

  ‘Kamini,’ says mummy, her eyes darting wildly around the kitchen. ‘Kamini mwaringa?’ (‘What, daughter?’)

  ‘Kamini?’ I screech as all eyes immediately stop looking around and focus on me. ‘This is fucking kamini!’ I yell as I point to the carnage. ‘Where are my fucking cups? Who dumped my fucking teabags on the floor?’

  I am shaking with rage. ‘And who did this?’ I grab my broken knife and wave it in the air for all to see while they take a step backwards, their eyes focused on the knife. At that moment I hear JJ’s voice outside. I look out the window. He is playing in the sand under the tree and is using my frying-pan lid as a shovel. One of my tablecloths is tied around his skinny little black shoulders as a cape while Panacua the king of the camp dogs lies in peaceful repose on another. JJ is busily shovelling the sand into mounds, the very same sand that the germ-ridden hairless dogs roll in to scratch their itchy skin and the local cats use as a toilet. I go back to my room and cry.

  A bit later on when I venture into the kitchen I notice two of the cups have been returned, but everything else is still missing. So I take a deep breath and clean up again and take the remnants of my kitchen paraphernalia back to my room. My big bowl that I brought along to wash my feet in before I go to bed will now double up as my washing-up sink as well. The tablecloth that Panacua slept on has been left for him while the one that JJ appropriated along with the frying-pan lid has been boiled and thoroughly scrubbed and made ready for my use. If I were back home down south I would have thrown everything away and started again but necessity has forced me to be thriftier and more careful in my ways. Everyone tiptoes around me now they know I’m in a bad mood and I’m fine with that, maybe they’ll learn not to touch things that they shouldn’t.

  The first night cooking in my room works well and I make myself some baked beans on toast. With no fridge to keep things cold the butter is liquid but I pour it over my toast and eat my meal with great relish. But when I go to the kitchen sink to fill my bowl for washing up there is what looks like a haunch of beef laid across the sink and the bit where the dishes drain. I had nothing to do with the kitchen when I was growing up and have never touched a piece of raw meat in my life so I find the sight of it confronting, but I know I have to get used to it here because meat and fish is mostly what people eat. They don’t bother with vegetables and gravy and stuff like that, just bread and meat. The raw meat smell makes me gag and I head for the laundry sink to get my water instead. But the laundry sink is full of Gemma and Louis’ clothes that smell like they have been sitting there for the past week. There is a scum on the surface of the water and a few dead insects floating in it as well. I head for the tap outside and see JJ standing nearby.

  ‘Taringa there,’ he says pointing to the grass near the tap. But I am in no mood for jokes and march up to the tap and fill my bowl with water. Bowl filled I turn to go back inside when I see movement in the grass. JJ was right, it’s a fucking snake. I nearly drop my bowl but I am determined to get this washing-up done so I cling onto it and slowly back away from the tap. Suddenly I feel something against my leg. I immediately drop the bowl and spin around only to see JJ running off laughing and waving a piece of grass at me. The little shit. The snake is still there so I grab my now empty bowl and march over the road to Aunty Marie Evelyn’s place. I march into her kitchen, fill my bowl and then march out again past where she is sitting with Uncle Stanley Bushman having some tea. They look at me in surprise. I give them a nod and head back home to do my washing-up. The clean plate and knife and fork and frying pan are dried up straight away and placed on the shelf in the corner where they sit with other useful things like a digital clock, some books, insect repellent, a compass, a torch and a pair of scissors. My clothes are neatly stashed away in my suitcase so I can close the zips and be assured there are no unwanted spiders or other insects lying in wait inside them to scare the crap out of me when I put them on.

  Glad that the day is over I lie on my blow-up camping mattress in my underwear and listen to the drunks fighting a few doors down. There is a dogfight out the back, probably instigated by Panacua who seems to like fighting more than he likes chasing the girl dogs, and some god-awful country and western music bleating over the road. But I’m determined to be positive and I tell myself it’s my first day back, I’ll get used to it and besides it could be worse. I could live in a country where bullets whistle overhead while you walk to school, I could live in a country where women are treated like slaves, I could have been born a bloke, and a white one as well – nothing could be worse than that. I have everything I need here, my family around me, food to eat, water to drink and a nice bed to sleep in with purple sheets and pillowcases and colour-coordinated curtains and towels.

  In the street light coming through a chink in the curtain I notice my little gecko friend Russell on the ceiling. He has been hanging around my room all day and I’ve called him Russell because he makes a rustly, clicky noise when he sings, like the clock on that TV show Sixty Minutes. I don’t know why geckos sing but I’ve noticed that Russell is quite vocal and that no other gecko messes with him. I try to make clicking noises at him but he ignores me. He darts around after insects that have landed on the ceiling nearby or stalks them until he is close enough to pounce. He is a good hunter and doesn’t usually miss. I never tire of watching him and the escapades of the other geckoes now that I don’t have a TV to watch. My thoughts turn to his feet and how he must stick to the ceiling. Maybe there are little suction pads on his toes that hold him in place and when he walks they might sound like a microscopic version of the suction pads on a rubber bath mat when it’s being pulled up. But suddenly Russell’s suction pads fail him and Russell, who was directly overhead, lands with a fleshy plop onto my exposed stomach. For a second I feel his skin against my skin. His translucent skin through which you can see dark-coloured patches of his internal organs and his little heart beating. Then his legs scur
ry across my belly while some amazing force propels me from my lying-down position to a standing-up position in two seconds flat. Shrieking and slapping at my body in case he’s still there somewhere, I race into the lounge room where mummy, JJ and Lorraine raise their tousled heads from sleep. They are instantly awake when they see that I’m only dressed in my bra and underpants. Thankfully my underwear is matching. Realising that Russell is not on me I stop slapping and gabbling and point at my door. Lorraine gets up to see what the fuss is about but she can’t see Russell anywhere and tells me he’s gone and to go back to sleep. Go back to sleep, I wasn’t asleep in the first place. It still evades me as I anxiously scan the ceiling and walls for Russell in case he tries that stunt again. But Russell must be curled up in some nice hidey-hole sleeping and during my anxious wait he doesn’t make an appearance again and I finally drop off.

  The shower is an awful place. It is a square yellow fibre-glass shower bottom sitting straight on the floor with the drain-hole with no grate over it stuck to a white PVC pipe, where a lot of light shines through into the shower in the daytime. There is no shower curtain and nowhere to hang one. The water goes everywhere, on the floor, up the walls, everywhere, no matter how hard you try to keep it in the shower base. The only way to keep my clean clothes and towel dry is to tie them in a plastic bag to the door handle. I wear my thongs in the shower so that when I step out my feet don’t get dirty again on the floor, and so I don’t get tinea because the old bat always told me that you get tinea from other people’s showers. But the worst part of the shower is that things live underneath it in the dark recesses that go up both sides and around the back as there is no tiling to block it off. So far I’ve encountered cockroaches and green tree frogs and one of them is enormous. The shower is at its most terrifying when I wash my hair and my eyes are closed because I think something is going to jump on me. I’ve had a few heart-stopping moments when I’ve opened my eyes and the frogs have been sitting there looking at me but so far they’ve kept to themselves. I’m surprised they come out at all because the soap and shampoo must irritate their skin but they must like sitting under the cold water like I do when I’m hot and in a bad mood. I made the mistake of leaving my soap and shampoo in the shower once, only to come back and find it all gone. I knew mummy wasn’t the culprit because she told me that she has never used soap in her life and she doesn’t intend to start, because it makes her sweat. She only uses water to wash with like our mob has been doing for thousands of years. She doesn’t smell or anything but it still seems a bit strange and I’m so used to using soap that I couldn’t imagine my life without it. Every night when I have my shower I wash my dirty clothes from the day as well and hang them out on a rope tied between two veranda posts. I wash my sheets and towels and tea towels every Saturday morning. Although previously I looked for every reason to avoid doing the washing, until I had to because I’d run out of underwear or something, I like the routine of doing it every day now. It seems to give my day some structure.

  I’ve used one of my sarongs to make a curtain for the toilet and I have threatened everyone not to remove it or they’ll have to deal with me. Mummy thinks it’s a waste of a perfectly good sarong but I don’t want anyone outside to see me using the loo so for me it’s worth the sacrifice. My thigh muscles are getting used to hovering over the toilet and not sitting on it in case there are germs, there were a few times when they nearly gave way from the strain but I’m mastering it now. There is also no seat and for some reason that makes the toilet seem even germier. Dunny paper is another contentious issue around here, we all supply our own and take it back to our rooms when we are finished otherwise there are huge fights over who’s used it all up. I’ve told mummy she can share mine but she’s never asked for it so maybe she doesn’t use dunny paper either. And the dunny paper is one-ply, like sandpaper, not soft and pliable like I’m used to, so I use it sparingly or risk taking layers of skin off with it. The store manager must think blackfellas have arses made of stone or something. When I’ve finished in the toilet I tie up the sarong so the toilet can air. I’ve promised myself I’ll get some bleach to put down it to kill the algal forest when I eventually go to the shop, which I have avoided because it looks scary with the hordes of black people hanging around it. Although I’m getting used to my own black family I’m still a bit worried by mass gatherings of black people.

  There are no rules about cleaning the lounge room and kitchen or the back and front verandas so I give them a sweep every day. Thankfully people have stopped throwing their used teabags everywhere and spitting after I kept whingeing about it. Sometimes Mario rakes the yard. If someone’s shoes or shorts are lying around he doesn’t care, he just sweeps them all up and into the bin they go. When I ask him why he replies that he doesn’t ask questions and goes on raking. I like that about Mario, no messing around. As for my bedroom, I sweep it with a dustpan and brush and mop it with an old tea towel every day and slowly the lino changes colour from brown to green. I show it to mummy and she laughs and says the whole house was like that once. She says this house was brand new when she moved in all those years ago when Louis was a baby and she’d won it in a raffle.

  2.

  Mummy is taking me to the store for the first time and I’m actually excited. I was quite worried at first in case there were riots or something, but after going to the footy on the weekend with my family for protection I’ve gotten over my fear of big crowds of black people. I now feel quite foolish for thinking they could be harmful to me and reckon I must have gotten this irrational fear from my white parents.

  Apart from the garage and the club there are no other places to spend your money except for the store. It doesn’t look too flash on the outside though, it’s just a big shed with a dusty waiting area and a few African mahogany trees for shade. There are some cars parked along the front and a bunch of people hanging around near the doors waiting for the place to open. We wander over to where Aunty Marie Evelyn is waiting with some young woman who sports a magnificent moustache. She is not in the least bit self-conscious about it nor about her legs which are so hairy you could plait them. I’ve noticed that none of the women around here shave their legs or underarms or pluck their eyebrows, something I spend endless hours on. I wonder what state this young woman’s pubic hair must be in and if she is making some sort of feminist statement before consulting my watch, my only concession to vanity on this island. It’s already five minutes past opening hours which I point out to mummy but she just grunts and goes on talking to aunty and the young woman. No one else hanging around outside the shop seems very worried either and I realise that the contrary opening hours might be a regular occurrence.

  Some young bloke opens the doors and then immediately flattens himself against the wall before everyone stampedes inside. This must be because closing hours are just as unpredictable as opening, and everyone has to grab what they can before being catapulted out the door again. I have visions of people racing up and down the aisles, trampling children and the elderly underfoot in their frantic quest to scrape armloads of groceries off the shelves into their speeding trolleys before the doors clang shut in their faces. My anxiety levels rise perceptibly with this thought and I stick close to mummy as we get carried inside by the throng. I notice a few dogs slipping in through the jumble of legs but no one shoos them outside.

  Once inside I look for a quiet spot and take in my surroundings while mummy rushes off. There are big drums of flour and everything is sold in bulk like the toilet paper and washing powder. There is no fruit and vegetable section, just a box of wilted lettuce and a few tomatoes, and there is no bleach, only this powdered stuff called Vim that we used as kids to clean up after ourselves when we had a bath. I can’t find any toilet brushes either so it looks like the algae in mummy’s toilet is going to stay right where it is. There is a shelf with a few exotic items for sale and I reach for a tin of pineapple and nearly drop it in shock after noting the use-by date expired over three years ago. A packet o
f Sao biscuits appears to have reached the final stages of decomposition and crumbles to dust in my hands, while objects resembling mummified oranges squat forlornly in their box on the floor. I can understand now why people are still hunting for food like they did before white settlement – the selection is pitiful.

  I search the melee for mummy and find her fighting with some woman over a drum of flour. There is a stack of flour drums right next to her, all the same brand and the same size, but mummy wants this one. She suddenly cracks the woman on the shins with her walking stick and triumphantly stalks off with her trophy, leaving the woman cursing and shaking her fist at the pair of us while I slink after mummy. We move into the next aisle and mummy picks up a massive tin of powdered milk and a big tin of sugar and tells me to get a box to put them in. I locate the boxes and grab one but mummy sends me back for a bigger one. I grab a disposable nappy box thinking this will shut her up, not realising that it will only provide her with more space to fill.

  After grabbing some tins of baked beans and something that feels like a lump of granite in a bread bag, mummy heads for the frozen meat section in our ever-widening search for something edible. The packets contain lumps of fat, gristle and bone slivered by a few threads of something that resembles meat. They are a disgrace. I look on in amazement as people jostle one another to grab more prime specimens of this heart-attack food and dump it into waiting arms and boxes.

  ‘The barge came in this morning,’ explains a rather large man, who by the look of him and his band of willing helpers are about to carry away the entire section. Another grabs a doorstep-sized chunk from the diminishing pile and scuttles off to the cash register with his prize while others nod and murmur approvingly.