Sometimes Gracey puts on the community radio station and sings along to country songs, or blues and jazz. Every new song is an old gem: these are the songs they used to sing together, and she hears her mum’s voice in her own. Sometimes she leaves the stereo off and sings by herself. After a while, some of the songs her mum used to sing to her in language come rolling off her tongue. Pouring out of her throat.
Visit by visit, story by story, and song by song, Gracey’s grief transforms into gratitude.
~
Every afternoon, Gracey fills a bowl with water from the river. She carries the river into her mum’s room and sets it down on the bedside table. She has to move all the photos and flowers and cards to make room.
She wets a soft cloth in the cool water, wrings it, then wipes her mum’s face and neck and chest with the damp wash cloth, then dips it again and wipes down her arms and hands. The water becomes cloudy quickly. She rinses the cloth then wipes her mum down again, wetting and wringing and wiping and rinsing with cool water. When she is finished, she empties the water back where it belongs, thankful for another day.
Every afternoon, Juna swims in the river with her daughter.
~
Day by day, Juna’s breath thins out. Gracey barely leaves her side.
One night, Gracey knows her mum is leaving. She sits on Juna’s bed and cradles her tiny head in one hand, and holds her skinny hands in the other.
Juna’s breathing is slower and shallower.
Gracey sings, murmurs, hums to her mother.
Juna takes her last breath in her daughter’s hands.
Gracey lies down and spoons Juna’s curled-up vessel, holds her in her arms the way she was held inside her belly once. She cries long and hard into her mother’s empty body.
Juna is leaving. She doesn’t mind. In fact, she barely understands what’s happening until it’s happened, because she’s too busy fishing and enjoying the presence of her daughter – especially her daughter’s voice, telling their stories and singing their songs. One moment Juna is there, the next she doesn’t belong to her body anymore.
A high-pitched buzz surges through her and vibrates exponentially, tone and sound sharpening and accelerating second by second until they peak in intensity, and when it all becomes too much she’s ejaculated from her body – a whole-being orgasm that ruptures her in spirit-shattering force. Skin emptied of herself, she escapes through her skull, campfire and fishing gear abandoned.
An immense clarity rushes through her, and strips away every single hurt and horror, leaving only the joys she’d grown and carried in her heart. She splices and separates into unfathomable directions, following the threads of everything and everyone and everywhere that had ever touched her, and so she is divided infinitely, because all that had ever touched her had also been touched by other hearts and minds and places, and so all around her country, and other creatures, and then the cosmos, she splits and peels and zooms, fracturing off in new directions with every feeling ever felt, shooting back and forth through time because all the love she ever had has manifold origins and futures.
Soon the entire known world is inadequate to hold her at the velocity she is flying, hurtling through inner and outer space faster than the speed of thought. She pings through stars and molecules and black holes and atoms and bypasses nothing, shooting at phenomenal warp speed towards the apex of the universe – the point of ultimate singularity where divisions between past, present, and future collapse into one preternatural state of fluid existence, and despite fractioning and fracturing infinitesimally, nothing of her is diluted but is restored to a wholeness of spirit by returning home to the repository of collective matter and memory – everything that ever was, is, and will be.
A new star is born in the sky, and ancestors around their campfires welcome their radiant daughter home.
Rainclouds gather in sympathy with Gracey’s loss.
Part of Juna swims into the clouds: part of her hitches a ride back to the river in a raindrop, and part of her splashes into the room through the window and onto her daughter’s face, who is still curled around her old body, and the rain mixes with Gracey’s tears and sinks into her skin, trickles into capillaries, into her blood, and swims around waiting to be reborn.
~
The rains have cleared, after a downpour that lasted a week, and the river is waist-deep with water.
The ceremony is in the backyard, and the place is packed. Everyone paints up in sacred ochre gathered from the marbled seams at the foot of the mountain. In a semicircle facing the water, most people sit on woven mats. Older people sit in chairs at the back. At the front of the formation, the young ones set up speakers and a microphone.
In language Nan Jenny welcomes everybody and gives thanks to country and ancestors. A handful of the older people take their turns saying goodbye. Gracey wants to say something but she doesn’t know what to say.
Aunty Trace leads the community singing her sister into the river. Gracey opens the jar and shakes the ashes in, wrist circling, her mother’s remains sprinkling in a spiral. The ashes trail and melt into the muddy water, and everyone floats her away with flowers and dirt, then waters her with tears. When it is done, they stop speaking her name so that the living will no longer haunt the dead.
Everybody gets into formation to dance their farewell song. Gracey hasn’t danced this dance in years. At first she is rusty, disembodied, but her muscle memory soon pulls her into the patterns of the dance. Underneath the barriers that time has created she’s still a cultural girl. With her community she dances this new iteration of a ceremony that has been passed down unbroken for millennia, dancing the way her ancestors did, on the very same ground – ground that has changed so much in a short time but still retains its memory. This deep and ancient energy connects her with all the moving bodies around her, grounding them all in their home.
Afterwards, the sky bruises into purple at the horizon. In a choreographed dance of rise and fall the sun drops behind the hills as a full moon pops up across the way. Crows sing out from the trees and a pelican glides around downriver. Some of the younger people strip off and play in the river. So much of the water isn’t there, but its history and its promises swirl together in the empty space.
Gracey watches at first, then joins in swimming. She can feel the old river still moving around her: a deliberate, weighted, immense body, thick and muddy, a huge snake carving out its path in the land, inscribing their songline through dusty banks. The ghost river is rebirthing, growing into its potential and ancient form from an ancestral template.
Laughing young people splash around in the long-lost water. Tiny bubbles of air and light reach Gracey’s skin, and her mother’s legacy attaches itself to her like a blanket and like armour.
Stepmother
SJ Norman
SJ Norman is a cross-disciplinary artist and writer, who has received numerous awards for his art, including a Sidney Myer Fellowship and an Australia Council Fellowship. His writing has won or placed in numerous literary awards, including the Judith Wright Poetry Prize and the Kill Your Darlings Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript. His first book, Permafrost, will be published by UQP.
They picked me up in their new car. It smelled of leather conditioner and perfume. Hers. French. Thick. She stunk, as my mother liked to put it, like a fuckin’ polecat. Everything about this woman, it was made clear to me, was to be despised. Everything, especially her expensive secretions. It was Madame Rochas, I think, and I secretly liked it. It smelled like the David Jones Christmas catalogue. It smelled like the holidays.
They didn’t come to the door, my mother didn’t go out. Their arrival was signalled by a single, sharp beep. The car, black and shiny as a leech, sat on the cracked concrete driveway, revving its engine like it couldn’t wait to get away. It didn’t look right in our scrappy, wire-fenced yard. The two Rottweilers were circling, sniffing its tyres. I
could see her face through the tinted windows, nervously watching the dogs, and watching me as I approached. The dogs barrelled up to me, almost slamming my knees out from under me with their joyful heft. I gave them each a nuzzle before sliding into the cream-leather embrace of the back seat. Immediately, she pulled a packet of Wet Ones out of the glove box and handed them to me.
I looked back and saw my mother’s backlit figure through the half-open side door. Hair dark and wild. Knew she’d be sucking her teeth.
My father fiddled with the stereo. Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust for Life’ came on. This was my dad’s driving jam. Track six on the Trainspotting soundtrack. It was actually my CD. My older brother had given it to me, at my request, for my birthday. It was perhaps a precocious choice for an eleven-year-old, but I’d seen the movie with my cousins and liked the sounds. She had seized it, seconds after I slid off the wrapping, and examined the cover before handing it to my father with a look. It was theirs now. A special soundtrack for weekend getaways in their German sports car. They showed me the moonroof. It was different to a sunroof, which was what my mother’s car had. A plane of grey glass separated you from the sky.
It was chilly. They were in their smart casuals. My father in a taupe windbreaker with lots of zippers and empty pockets. She was encased in a crop coat of black rabbit fur, and more gold than usual. Dragging the tips of her red enamel fingers over the contours of a map.
I never knew how to act with them so most of the time I kept quiet. I felt like a spy behind enemy lines. My silence made them (and her, especially her) even more nervous. I was surly and antisocial. Or withdrawn might have been the word she used. When they spoke to me it was loud, over-the-shoulder and over-articulated. The same way I’d heard them talk to Ngoc, their Vietnamese cleaner. When they spoke to each other in my presence it was all whispers. They slipped between the two modes like ventriloquists.
The sun visor on her side was down and in the little mirror I could see her tits. She wears them like they’re on sale, my mother had said. Thrust to the front of the shelf. Overripe. They were permanently festooned with gold pendants. A Buddha from Cambodia. A locket from her dead Polish mother. She’d wear up to seven at a time, all clattering and glittering in her cleavage. There would always be at least one crucifix among them: she was a proud Catholic. The size and texture of her breasts fascinated me. They’d spent a lot of summers exposed on foreign beaches, basted in Reef oil. The loosening brown crust of her décolletage contained the globes of soft tissue, like the skin of a baked dessert contains the custard. I thought that maybe breasts would be a nice thing to have. A flesh mantle to protect the heart.
‘So, the big One-Two!’ my father said, referring to my recent birthday. ‘Almost a teenager.’
I nodded. Almost.
By this stage the CD had been changed. It was George Michael singing ‘Freedom’. Another one of my father’s favourite highway tunes, at least until he was made aware of the shocking truth of George Michael’s sexuality, at which point that disc was quietly filed away, never to be played in the car again.
To the left there was the cold expanse of Lake George. Of all the scenery on the road to Canberra, that’s the stretch that I always remember. How suddenly the void of that lake appears. It’s unquiet country. To the right, a steep bluff, crowded with dark trunks of bloodwood gums and grey boulders, fringed with shivering grass. A burnt-out car body. A high fence of barbed wire. Everything unearthly silver.
There was a storm coming. When we stepped out of the car you could feel the electricity in the air. We had spent an hour following the maddening concentric loops of the Nation’s Capital before we found the turn-off to our hotel. Behind a dense hedge, it was as hushed and guarded as the embassies that surrounded it. Clocks behind the front desk indicated the time in ten different countries. The receptionist’s badge glinted. It smelled the way that hotels smell.
You could hear muffled claps of thunder outside. By the time we got to our suite, heavy rain was pelting the windows. I sat on the quilted bedspread of one of the two single beds in my room. The one closest to the door, the one I’d chosen. My twin room was adjacent to their double, separated by a door that locked on their side. They had the minibar and the television. I was happy to be alone but I wanted a Snickers.
‘Can I have this?’ I made my way into their room and opened the minibar to find the chilled chocolate bars, lined up in size order in their creaseless wrappers. I pulled one out. ‘Dad? Can I?’
She was at the window cracking the neck of a baby bottle of Gordon’s, preparing a couple of G and Ts. They always had one at this time. A cigarette between her fingers, she looked at the chocolate bar in my hand, then at my father. Rolled her eyes.
My father’s face contorted with pity and disgust. ‘You don’t need it, sweetie.’
The National Gallery, monumental ode to pebblecrete, surrounded by acres of car park. A banner unfurled down its side announced the arrival of The Queen’s Pictures, the big midyear exhibition. A selection of the finest from the Windsor family vault would be gracing the colonies with their presence for three months.
We made our way through the galleries. The two of them walked ahead of me, her heels making a hasty racket through several rooms of Papunya canvases, seething with the colours of the desert. Eventually we reached the antechamber of the main exhibition space and found our place at the end of the queue, a heaving congregation of quiet bodies, rain-spattered jackets and damp beanies, inching down the corridor towards the exhibition entrance. There were two invigilators at the door to the gallery, one manning the grunting ticket machine, the other standing at one end of a velvet rope, unhooking it periodically to let punters through in clusters. We waited our turn. My father’s arm around her waist. All of us shivering, the wet soles of our shoes streaking the floor.
The faces of angels. Virgin and Child. Monarch in profile. From the workshop of. Attributed to. Virgin and Child. A woman, carrying a man’s head on a platter. Looking pleased with herself. Three strange Flemish children, dark eyes, skin like dough. Cherries and small oranges. Man with fur collar and medallions. Cleft chin, flat plane of burgundy behind. A king. A merchant. Two women and a man adoring the holy newborn. Virgin and Child. The women’s hands clasped in prayer. Virgin and Child. The man’s fingers, pincered, slightly camp, delivering a blessing. The baby cocks one leg up. Virgin and Child. Sometimes soft, rendered fleshy, drapery spilling from the body of Mary. Blue sky behind. Others, flat. Sideways, elongated, Byzantine. Peeling gilt, angels stuffed in the corners. The faces of angels. Virgin and Child. Psyche exposed on a rock. Two nymphs and a satyr. The worshippers of Dionysus. Women with blood in their teeth. Animal skins. Panels for the decoration of a palace interior. Albrecht Dürer. The muscular faces of the Black Forest. Death, always, stuffed in a corner. The faces of angels. The Italians with their saints and the British with their nobility. Mermaid feeding her young. There are seven of them, all boys. She has a breast for each of them. Seven breasts. All suckling. The frothing ocean. Looking pleased with herself. Virgin and Child. This one: Christ child a beefy suburban toddler. The kind of kid that would hassle the neighbour’s cat. Mary’s firm bicep, visible under her sleeve.
We moved from room to room, like insects devouring a carcass. I was fascinated by the portraits of European noblewomen. It was their enhanced silhouettes that held particular appeal. The rooms were chronologically ordered and every one revealed a new stage in the evolution of corsetry, beginning with the rigid triangles of the Elizabethans through to the extreme hourglass of the Victorians. I was prepubescently potato-shaped and I regretted not living in an era of stiff bodices and long skirts. I was reminded, on a daily basis, both of my girl-ness and my failure at executing girl-ness to the satisfaction of my female elders. ‘Womanhood’ was a yet remote and compelling proposition: among other things it seemed as though woman-ness was something you could put on and take off. It had forms that were standardised and
replicable. Looking at rooms full of corsetted waists, I felt some deep and perverse relief. I wondered what it would be like to always be so upright, to be so held, to relinquish your form to that whalebone embrace?
She was walking ahead of me. Having shed her rabbit fur, her flesh was uncontained. The black bodysuit was truncated by a leather skirt, taut over the mound of her arse. She would pause every time we passed a religious icon. Sometimes going so far as to raise her hands to her mouth, overcome with emotion. My father was fond of the more vanilla Gainsboroughs and any picture with a seafaring theme. He looked at the tall ships with the same captivated longing as I looked at the Victorian silhouettes. A mutual tendency to indulge in period-themed escape fantasies is one of the few things my father and I have always had in common.
We spent almost as long in the gift shop as we did in the exhibition. They bought a framed print of a Turner for the study. I selected a couple of postcards. Andrea del Sarto’s Red Virgin. Vincenzo Catena’s Salome (for my mother). A Gainsborough of a woman on a swing, suspended in a green cave of summer foliage. And from the workshop of Giulio Romano, the glorious seven-titted mermaid feeding her young.
‘You can’t let her go swimming unsupervised, Marcus. She’s a child!’
I was already in my costume, my goggles on my head, ready to tear off down the corridor in search of the hotel swimming pool. They were dressing for dinner. She was sweeping a curling iron through her fine, copper hair. I could smell it burning.
‘She could swim before she could walk, darling. She’ll be fine.’
She pursed her lips and turned back to the mirror. ‘It’s not safe. She should stay in the room.’
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