*** Editor’s Pick ***
Yuletide
Bob Edgar
Wentworth Falls, NSW
David was a sad little boy. I remember his name because he was my first.
We were both eleven years old and shared the same birthdate, which may have been why I befriended him. David never smiled. Try as I might, I could not get a genuine smile from him.
I, on the other hand, had been blissfully happy since a very early age, due to the education my parents had given me. Mummy and Daddy taught me that in Heaven, everybody is happy every moment of the time, forever and ever. I turned eight years old on the 24th of December 1938, and my parents had a very special gift for me.
The three of us sat at the kitchen table drinking the birthday juice.
‘Finish your drink Timothy, like a good boy. Then Mummy and Daddy will drink and we will meet you in Heaven, and be happy forever and ever.’
I remember vomiting all over Mummy and Daddy who were slumped over the kitchen table.
It was expected that he would have a mental breakdown, but I ... he didn’t. We were the happiest children in the orphanage, knowing that our parents were smiling, forever and ever.
David trusted me and believed me when I told him I could make him smile again. We had been splashing and frolicking in our secret waterhole for an hour before I asked David if he could smile for me. It was after all, our twelfth birthday. His sad face shook from side to side. I dived underwater and gripped his ankles. Expelling my breath I sank to the bottom, dragging David’s body with me. I released my hold on him, and as we surfaced I wrapped my hands around his throat forcing my thumbs into the front of his neck.
It was reported that when David’s body was discovered he had a look of terror on his face. But I knew that his spirit was smiling in Heaven.
I left the orphanage one month before my thirteenth birthday to go into the care of my Aunt Beatrice, who had enjoyed living alone for thirty years. My peaceful countenance and indelible smile infuriated Aunt Beatrice; she insisted I should still be grief stricken, as she was.
We were standing on platform thirteen, at 1pm on the 24th of December 1943 when I made a vow to myself. Every year on my birthday I would make one person happy, forever and ever. This year it was Aunt Beatrice’s turn.
By 3pm most of her remains had been recovered and deposited into body bags. The train driver would smile again one day; and of course Aunt Beatrice was in a perpetual state of happiness.
I was thirteen now and had the guile to manipulate my way through life with ease. I would live on the streets at times, and if I desired I could wend my way into someone’s home, and life. I would never again be with a relative or friend, as was my wish. This being the case, I found that from my fourteenth birthday on, I could randomly choose my recipients.
My third was a particularly unhappy man I had sat next to on a park bench. He smelt almost as vile as the language he used to dismiss me from the bench. The rock I dropped on his face was too heavy to lift a second time, so reluctantly I left it on his crushed head; his blood and viscera seeping from beneath the rock into his half eaten sandwich.
He will thank me when I get to heaven, for transforming his existence from one of misery to one of joy.
Today is my forty-third birthday and number thirty-one will be my last recipient. The doctors at the General Hospital assured me the tumour in my brain would kill me before March. Today’s payee will have to demonstrate to me that he or she has an aversion to smiling; indicating an inability to achieve happiness.
I close the door behind me and step out into the gutter; sheathing the butcher knife, I softly sing for the thirty first time ...
‘You better watch out, you better not cry, better not pout, I’m ... telling ... you ... why ...’
Bob says he smiles more often since writing this piece :)
Ed: I love the evil simplicity of this story, or perhaps it’s the simple evilness of it? Either way, I’m still humming that last line with a shiver down my spine ...
Tuesday 12 June 2012 8 am
To My True Love
Felicity Lynch
Katoomba, NSW
You enchant me with your beauty
Cold winds and sleeting rain
Cannot affect you
Your eyes shine in the moonlight
Your skin a quiet radiance
Your smile lights up the darkness
It is so cold
Your shivering arouses in me
The urge to shelter and cradle you
Come run with me
Lightning can flash
And thunder roar
In my arms
You who I adore
Will remain mine
Tuesday 12 June 2012 4 pm
Picture
Gordon G
South Yarra, VIC
Staring at your picture frame
The picture in it is not the same
Reminds me when in bed at night
You’d cling to me, my epiphyte
I see you now so pale and thin
The demons within you, they now win
The substance you’ve replaced love with
Eats away at you bit by bit
And I can’t help but feel the shame
Now you say you can’t love again
A love, you say, would still remain
If I were in your picture frame
Wednesday 13 June 2012
Music
Don Beer
Mawson, ACT
You, dear reader, do not need me to tell you of the pleasure that music brings. From almost the moment of birth babies delight in tinkling wind-chimes and simple tunes. For a teenager to sing the latest pop song is to express, to enjoy, to relieve the angst or perhaps the joy of adolescence. An unpretentious folk song like ‘Danny Boy’ may overwhelm with its pure beauty of emotion. If you, dear reader, are of a more sophisticated mind, no doubt you have luxuriated in the compositions of some of the greatest geniuses the human race has produced. Through music, it might be said, mankind reaches its highest perfection.
Perhaps you think I am laying it on a bit thick. You protest: ‘But music is not simply self-indulgence.’ And I must agree. Friends have told me how they have been led to God by the glory and the mystery of Bach’s cantatas. Once I ran by chance into an old acquaintance in a London street. We repaired to a nearby pub where, with intense fervour and at great length, he impressed on me that his personality had been quite altered, indeed his life changed utterly, by a new interpretation of Beethoven’s Fifth he had heard from Otto Klemperer’s baton two nights before. Soldiers tell of how they have been inspired to battle by the sound of bagpipes.
For myself I love music. In fact, I often dream of it. One scenario recurs. I am in rehearsal for the approaching first night of an opera or perhaps a Sunday School concert. The cast or choir is about me. There is a kindly conductor or choirmaster. But what is always clear is that I have the leading role. I am the soloist. And all is going well. I have called it a dream. But it is really a nightmare, for what nobody in the ‘dream’ knows except me is that I am tone-deaf. I cannot sing a note. I know that disgrace is only a night or two away. Everyone is about to learn my unspeakable secret. I wake up in a sweat.
For I am tone-deaf. It is true that I cannot sing a note. I used to love to sing in the shower, but now even I am saddened by the flat, monotonous sounds I create. I have confessed my sin to my closest musical friends and I find their reactions interesting. Some respond, ‘Oh really’ and pass quickly on to another topic of conversation. If I said that I had B.O. or leprosy, I would get a more sympathetic response. Others try to minimise my affliction. ‘My uncle is tone-deaf,’ they will say, ‘and he’s a music teacher.’ Or, ‘I believe that ten per cent of Australian males are tone-deaf to some degree.’ They just don’t understand.
Music – or the lack of it – has shaped my life. I remember how I disliked being taught the Tonic Sol Fa in a large hot room with over eighty other seven-year-olds at primary school. From then on I was one of those boys who gathered self-consciously at the back of the room during singing lessons and misbehaved as quietly as possible. Even then I was aware that I was missing something, and when a new headmaster decided to form a school choir that would sing at prestigious events, I could not help wanting to be a part of it. The more my tuneless classmates were weeded out and sent to spend the rest of the singing lesson in the library, the more I wanted to be in the choir. At last near the end of one lesson the headmaster came down the back row of students listening for false notes. I mouthed the words carefully. He stopped in front of me. He listened. I mouthed. After an interminable pause he turned, retraced his steps to the dais, and sent us off to our regular classrooms. I was elated. At the next lesson I was keener than ever. The headmaster resumed his listening at the back row. I mouthed the words. Then, enthusiasm taking over, I ‘sang’ two or three words. Before I realised it, I was in the library asking for a book.
For a time when I was in my mid-teens, I felt called to become a minister of religion. I was devout and I had observed that the Methodist minister had a position of respect in our rural community. Yet gradually and sadly it became clear to me that a minister, especially a Methodist minister, has to be able to sing. Of course by my late teens I knew all the rationalist arguments against believing in God but without the mortification of being unable to sing hymns I might not have given them the serious weight that I eventually did. Who knows what course my life would have taken, what guilty pleasures I might have avoided, if I had remained a believer, still more become a minister?
How carefully have I arranged my life since then to avoid embarrassment! My brother, for all his other inadequacies, had a gift: he became an outstanding trumpeter and played in leading bands, which allowed him to get the best-looking girl at the dance while, out of step and out of sympathy with the music, I stumbled around the floor alienating partner after partner. So, foregoing the delicious joy of touching and talking to girls, I stopped going to dances. Later when visitors to my house gathered round the piano for a sing-song, I would quietly leave the room on the pretence of making the supper – and I would be sure never to invite them again. With what determination have I avoided trivia nights since the humiliation of getting far ahead of all other competitors only to be unable to recognise a single tune or sing a single line of the requisite song in the last, the musical, section of the contest.
About the time of my retirement an Italian music teacher called Paolo came to town. Paolo prided himself on helping the allegedly tone-deaf to sing. ‘No one is tone-deaf’, he declared. ‘Everyone can learn to sing.’ He had some conspicuous and public successes. I thought that I too would learn to sing. Singing would be the key part of my new life – my life in retirement would be as rich as that of normal people. I went to Paolo. We had an hour together. He taught me to breathe correctly, he encouraged me to relax, he expressed his confidence in my ability to sing, and he asked me what song I would like to learn. I said ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon. This brought him up short. ‘Perhaps “Yesterday”?’ he suggested. ‘“Imagine” is very difficult.’ So we sang ‘Yesterday’ together. I could tell – with difficulty but I could tell – that what I was singing was very different to what he was singing. At the end of the hour he suggested that I come back in a month’s time after I had practised ‘Yesterday’, but I knew from the flatness of his voice, the extended period of practice he suggested and the fact that he asked for his fee on the spot that even the ever-positive Paolo had effectively given up on me. I didn’t go back.
Now I am without hope. I study contemporary issues, I guide in the Botanic Gardens, I write short-stories. And I accept that the deeper pleasures, the higher realms of human achievement, are beyond me. My life is as flat as my voice.
Thursday 14 June 2012 8 am
Frangipani Galaxy
Mary Krone
Glenbrook, NSW
Tall Sri Lankan frangipanis
Open trees
Low gnarled branches
Saucer sized white flowers
The fragrance makes you giddy
In an ancient grove
Dark wood fades to background
White petals luminescent in the moonlight
Stars within reach
At eye level
Dotting the air above
Scattered on the ground
Filling the night as far as can be seen
No sense of up or down
Frangipani galaxy
Antithesis of a cold, silent cosmos
In the warm damp air
Mellifluent calls of evening birds
and
Myriad insects sing an overture
Against froggie rhythmic percussion
Sensual hyper-reality
Crushing stars with every footfall
Bumping into branches
Hidden by twinkling stars
Thursday 14 June 2012 4 pm
A Floral Wreath
John Ross
Blackheath, NSW
Mary and William were married in the springtime in Paris. They were both working there for the Australian Government immediately after the war. They were very young and madly in love. For their first wedding anniversary William gave Mary a linen rose made in an exclusive little shop in Montmartre. They returned home to Australia shortly afterwards, but each year, on their anniversary, William had one of the linen roses sent from Paris so he could give it to Mary.
Sadly William lost Mary just last year. William had a floral wreath made up from all the linen roses that he had sent Mary on their wedding anniversaries, and laid it on her grave after her funeral.
Friday 15 and Saturday 16 June 2012
Bangla Road, Patong
Eddie Blatt
Pottsville, NSW
‘It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.’
Jane Austen
I’m sitting on a stool outside the Honky-Tonk Bar on another sweltering summer’s evening in Thailand. Although I rarely drink alcohol, I was ensnared by an enthusiastic Thai man waving a sign that read: ‘All cocktails. Buy 1 get 1 free’. I couldn’t resist his ardent enthusiasm (or the pretty girls beside him dressed in the shortest of mini-skirts), so I ordered a gin-and-something at the bar and perched myself on a high stool overlooking the infamous Bangla Road in Patong. It’s happy hour and that’s exactly what I’m feeling – happy. And not just because the alcohol is already playing games with the synapses in my brain, or the hem of the girls’ skirts occasionally flutter above the contours of their well-rounded posteriors. No, I’m mostly happy because the temperature is hovering around the 30°C mark, and the air is so muggy you could swear you were sitting in a steam bath.
The thing is, contrary to most peoples’ predilections, I love the heat – passionately – in a way some people love their Chihuahuas and others their old Elvis records. And I love watching people amble by, all wanting to get someplace from someplace else. What makes Bangla Road so fascinating is that it is one of the hubs of the sex industry in Thailand. The atmosphere is poignant with alcohol, cigarettes and sexy girls in tight tops and knee-high boots dancing around poles positioned in the middle of a multitude of bars. Lady-boys covered in mascara and eye-shadow promenade up and down the road in scenes that would not be out of place in a Fellini movie. The accumulation of techno/disco music, excessive banter, and clanging bells when someone shouts free drinks for everyone at a bar, is so loud I can hardly hear my own thoughts – which aren’t a bad thing given how confusing they are at the moment, due to the almost-finished gin-and-somethin
g cocktail.
Bangla Road, Patong, is an iconic three-hundred-metre-long male adult fantasyland. It’s trapped between a frenzied beach road at one end and a large, almost impossible-to-cross, heavily trafficked motorway at the other. On one side, numerous open-faced bars with tables and stools on the footpath, pack tightly together; bars with names like the Honey Bar, the Boom Boom Bar, Scruffy Murphy’s Irish Bar (which sits next to another dubious icon, McDonald’s); and the Kangaroo Bar frequented by Australians watching AFL footy games on large television screens. On the other side of the road, where I currently sip the last few drops of my drink, there are several short dead-end pedestrian-only side streets, or ‘Sois’ in Thai, each with a series of bars and A Go-Go clubs. The A Go-Go clubs are interspersed with the bars on either side of each Soi, while down the middle, bar-girls dance around poles coaxing male customers to buy ‘lady-drinks’ (drinks that are composed mainly of coke spiked with a little alcohol) for exorbitant prices, as well as attempting to secure transactions of a more carnal nature.
The Honky Tonk Bar is well positioned on the corner of Bangla Road and the entrance to Soi Easy. It’s not a venue run by people wanting to procure lady-drinks from its clientele, or indeed anything else. The sole purpose of this bar is to sell alcohol; lots of it, which suits my current impulse to simply sit and watch the evening’s activities unfold without having to deal with the lascivious activities of bar-girls. Unfortunately, the quantity of liquor I might imbibe on any one night is exponentially proportional to the frequency of urination. With every drink, the frequency increases dramatically, as does my anxiety when the whereabouts of the nearest toilet is unknown. Already, after only one cocktail, I’m feeling that familiar pressure on my bladder requiring fast and decisive remedial action.
In more customary surroundings, such an undertaking would not pose a problem. However, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who finds herself falling into an unknown Wonderland, I was about to plummet into an adventure that would end in a most unexpected way. Little did I imagine a toilet would provide a pivotal setting for this unfoldment.
narratorAUSTRALIA Volume One Page 22