*
One foot. What’s next? She will have forgotten. She’ll sway in her slippers in the ultraviolet. She will have forgotten her mouth is open, and oxygen and words spill down. Her neck is a tremor. Her voice comes out of it nothing like a hymn. Is it help or hello? Her tongue has forgotten. It blinks in and out of her pleading. The corridor throbs and splits four sealed grey ways and she shakes on its cross of clean roads. All she will want is to make her way back to her blue cell, to her crocheted crawlspace. But she’ll have forgotten which side of the world it is on.
*
She will forget the clock. It is lines on the moon. It is stones in a pool. She will remember, somewhere, a pool, for a second, and she will see herself, trailing a tide of pale hair, all slipped from its pins, which she knows is like silk to the boy she teases, which she knows is as good as a lure, which is golden and sultry and tugging at her scalp, with her toying and flouncing and leading him on, with whinnies of bad, so she takes him, on a dance at the end of her mane, takes him off on a shimmery goose chase, through slashes of birch and stumble of fence, through breezy laughter and muddy romp, and they come to a pool, and she lets him brace her, his shivery length along her frock, at the water’s edge, she lets him cup her cool palm with the tilt of a good flat stone, and he teaches her to skim, and she remembers the scud of the pebble, its grazing rebound off the gleam. They forget the time. The hands they know about are under their seams, are urging at cloth. The hands they’ll remember are clammy, and paddling with heartbeats of want under heavy serge. The hands are making her dip and rise again, arc and lap and rise. She’ll forget the clock. She’ll forget what time her father wants her home.
*
It’s the music that doesn’t forget her. Where do they play it? Is she in church? She will forget she never liked the carry-on of scripture, couldn’t stomach all its uppity fuss. She’s never liked the vicar who warbled and strutted round his pulpit, a finicky font of shalt nots. She’s never liked the disc she had to suck from his index, doesn’t like the goblet with its plasma slurp, his gown’s musty swish. She doesn’t like his crouch-down to bless her, breath as bad as his flowery twaddle about sin. She doesn’t like the mortified picture of Christ tacked up in his loincloth, chicken-skin white. She’s got no time for pomp. But she can’t fault the music. Against her better judgement, against her grudges, those notes press in, make her chest swell. Her breathing rears. Her wristbones hallelujah. And she’ll forget she’s an oldie in velour, forget she’s been tucked in with crochet squares. She’ll forget that the tune is being henpecked out on a keyboard of corny plastic watts by a troop of God-botherers the likes of which she once used to dodge on her street with merry snorts of scorn. The bones in her feet know the tempo and bob in their pumps. The bridge nods her balding head. Her eyelids fill: Jesu.
*
Down at the base of her skull the siren has picked out the crossings of terror in her blood. The shelter, the shelter – she’s forgotten the way. And now the road hairpins, there’s billows of brick, the buildings making jagged shifts, the chapel coming at her in floes of stone. Out of its white side she watches the next hit blowing the blueprints of stained-glass God.
Where is the shelter? Where is it? Where? She should know – her father walked her, chanting, mapped it, over and over and over. But now there’s nothing where she should turn left, the landmarks crushed to haze. The shops are chalk. She calls his name, but her teeth are liquid. She takes unwieldy steps, fresh alleys scraped by fire, black girders, her shoes blunted with blood. Windows she recognises stretch their last gleam, then ignite. The pavement fishtails, breaks the grip of her feet, tips her face-first into dust.
The bombs go off until all the world feels bloodshot.
When her father finds her, much later, there’s no talk between them. Their mouths brim with silt, their hearing numbed. Atoms still hang in the air in spasms trying to find the shapes they were blasted from. She stumbles with him home. She doesn’t question. They slip and blink. They pass what they have to. A man whose sleeves unspool into nothingness. A child tugging at the tongue of a boot, above the ankle his parent a load of smoke. She follows her father’s trudge.
She will forget they’re the lucky ones. Because her father never recovers. He gets her home then he lies down and does not get up. He stays put, woundless and whole. He lies in his bed, what they’ve seen like a stone on his chest, his name carved cold. He dies of it. She watches him die of it. He dies of not being able to forget.
*
At night the walls of her room will be a bare screen for small things being forgotten. Willows over a plate, in blue shivers. Cockles dropped with soft clacks in a bucket. Pine needles picked from the staves of his boot. The scallop shell where he tapped his ash. The school gate swinging on its crisp hinge of lichen. The tongue of a scrabbling lamb, its warm ribbed suckle. White shirts breaching on the shrill back line. An east wind chiselling light through trees. Never enough to keep the film running, never enough to still a scene. She blinks and they’re watercolour. Tries to speak and they pass like dreams or breath. Her lids are a vanishing point.
All forgotten.
*
The boat will move in her mind like forgetfulness. She won’t remember the sway of it there. She will forget the ache of its rolling, days lost to salt in the lurch of its tread. She’s left one world, split off from the wharf, and has no pictures to bring her the next one. What will the next world look like, and who will she be, standing fatherless in its fields? She seems to forget anything but the ocean – ocean rising in iron lines of swell, or sleek as glass in the wide landless glare. For nights she latches herself in her cabin, bolts herself away still dressed, her heels in their buckles, the sweat streaking into her coat – she won’t meet the alarm (which she knows must come, as sirens do, they always do) with indecent skin in the moonlight, a spectacle of bare limbs sunk. She lies down terrified, groomed and buttoned, waiting for the sure SOS. But the rock of the ocean speaks to her, enters her clothes, the blackwater rhythm of smooth and shock. She slips to the deck, a graceless stagger on boards. And finds that she loves it. The water moves like whiplash. The wind laughs in her throat. Her hair blurs with stars. She raises her arms in the silky overhang of cloud, says the word starboard like it is beautiful.
*
She will forget the photographs he pins to the wall beside her bed. The faces in them will go out like lights, the trees and streets standing in the wash of past, nameless. Some days he will lift them from their thumbtacks, he’ll float them in figure eights above her gaze, remember Mum, eh Mum, look, you remember. But she will forget the girl by the birdbath, her bulldog huddled to her gingham dress. She will forget the low stone wall with its slurry of muck, its gaggle of piglets, the child in giant galoshes who gives squealing chase. She’ll forget the man by the gangplank, holding out the woven tropic nonsense of a hat, mock bandito, his grin in its tequila glaze, his fool shins sunburnt. She will forget the same man, stooping, to mortar the base bricks of their house, shirt a white straggle poking from his back pocket, the sun working north along the bones of his spine, against the grain of his sweat (she’ll forget how much she loves each seam that liquid runs). She’ll forget the roly-poly woman with her Xmas tipple in her crêpe-paper hat, laughing at the chit of the cracker joke until she topples off her chair, takes a rush of tinsel with her. She will forget the joke. She will forget the stitch on the blanket that the woman is rocking – shell, chain or crocodile? – forget the lullaby she’s humming down into the bundle’s drowsy face. Is it ‘Danny Boy’? He can’t remember either, as he pins the dark snuffed squares back to the wall.
*
She’ll forget the white rabbit. She’ll be out by the washline and flick up the catch to let the little thing out. She’ll be strapping out the heavy slumps of sheets to set their wet loads cracking in the northerly, and she’ll let the baby jumble round on his bum on the dewy grass to get to the lemons, scattered from the tree in dimpled thuds. She’ll let him suckle
on their pocked yellow balls. She’ll shoo the rabbit closer to him just to make him gurgle, clapping his podgy hands at its flops. It’s the sheets, it’s the sheets that conceal it, the black-and-white bullet of the next-door’s dog. It comes in and out the sheets, their wet white banners, the bloody lightspeed launch of the dog, which hits the creature, flings it up, figure eight, in a grisly snarling jolt. And the sheets will bluster her outstretched hands and coat her mouth and blanket her calls. And it won’t be until she beats to the end of their terrible flapping corridors that she’ll know what it is that runs wet in the dog’s manic growls, that she’ll know what is pinned and barbed in its muzzle. She’ll forget to bring the washing in. But in two days’ time she will refill the coop with a small bright bunny, a twin of born-again fuzz. The baby forgets. The baby will never know the difference.
Did she forget? She must have left the cage open again. The dogs have got to her memory.
*
She will forget her teeth. She will watch them in their blue cup of soak and not know they were ever hers, their pearly stained curve, their arches of caramel. What did she say with them? Who did she use to open them for, clicking through the puzzle of sounds, her tongue swishing the glyphs. She watches the bubbles, which lift off the molars like syllables. The half-moon palate fizzed with translucence. A beaded vocabulary sizzling, and lost. Anyway it will be easier to let go the words now she’s forgotten them. She can let them go soft. They can run off the edges. If her mouth can’t make them neither can her mind.
*
She’ll forget that he’s already gone. He was always getting ahead of her – into the bookies for a flutter, the pub for a pint and a yarn, down the wharf to see a man about a dog. She could never keep up. And is that him now, hooting down the hall, with talk full of blarney, all smiles and tall stories, roping everyone in with the scheme of his grin? She’ll forget supper, be dragging the kid by the hand to hunt him down, to smarten him up, talk sense, get him on the straight track home. But you can’t knock that grin, how he’ll nod fair enough, fall in step, turn his racket of charm on her and the boy, and he’ll canter them home, all cheek and malarkey, the kid a fool for his chuckles, smitten. And her no better: how can a woman be expected to fend that off, the wow of it. How can she store up the scores against him, the list of sore points and fibs and flaws – she’d dare any red-blooded woman to do it, faced with the dimpled no-good of that grin. She knows the moment she’ll give in – he’ll pledge to clean up, and he’ll hand her the razor. Kitchen chair straddled, he’ll cantilever back – into her fingers he’ll stretch his dark throat. He’ll say nothing, but hum as she grazes, philtrum, shadows, Adam’s apple, the blade in the soap a bristled hiss. She’ll forget it all. She’ll willingly forget.
*
The nurses are a side effect of forgetting. The face of one nurse slides into another. Their blue zip tunics and tough white shoes fill with ghost after efficient ghost. Even her son will forget their names. But he’ll say to the last one, as he’s hunched by the bed, there must be a word for this. And she’ll pause behind him, place a palm on his shoulder. No, she’ll say. Without a word for it, you can let it go. He won’t believe her but he’ll drop his head, let her voice in. Repeating: in time, you’ll forget.
*
Kisses in the threshed barn, the itchy glow of hay. Catching her breath in his laboured clothes, his musk of pine and turpentine and honey. A picnic table at the foot of a gorge. The deep-fried rustle of fish and chips. Playtime, zipping her boy into his parka, the plastic crunch of old rain. Flax moving to the creek in fibrous whispers. Bathing the baby in the late afternoon, laying him out on his shawl to babble, her face above him teasing up squeals and kicks, his fingers waggling for ends of her stray hair – just let her remember this – wordless gurgles of love.
point of view
(for L.B.)
I’m giving my character a drinking habit. Or drugs. I haven’t decided yet. Part of me thinks her apartment won’t be real unless there’s the sound of bottles – the cold at her back door, its late-night mesh-screen squeal (I don’t know, I could maybe cut this?) might need the bottles’ secretive clink, her spine feeling the teeth of her zip as she works to huddle those bottles down in the bin, under the layers of other tenants’ rubbish, plastics, a nest pulled from hairbrush quills (ash blond), frills of rare steak and citrus. Paper showing amounts owed and personal stains. That scene’s not real without the bottles.
But maybe she (Gabriella?) brews tea. Maybe she looks up on the internet how to boil leaf, only leaf, so it’s not so illegal, or doesn’t feel it anyway, feels culinary, herbal, strictly medicinal, kind of wise-woman to be standing in her galley, in her dressing gown of scarlet fleece, with its fat waist sash, the pale sag of her belly bisected by its decent felty knot, stewing up a broth, a brown-green decoction (check colour details) that looks wholesomely slimy and seemly. She’s an older woman, fifty or so, slipper-wearing, with grey roots, leached of oestrogen – it’s not an addiction (she tells herself, prodding the seepage with a silver spoon, one of a fancy set inherited from her mother – might the mother be useful later?), she just needs a nightcap to sleep. No one knows the madness that sets in if you don’t sleep. And don’t sleep. And don’t sleep. And don’t sleep. And Gabriella has been laid straight on the sheets for weeks, her eyes jammed tight on the frontal lobe of her brain, which buzzes with hot black lonely weight.
But it’s hard to give up the sound of the bottles. I’m thinking it might prove too hard. Because: Gabriella could remember a day where she once took a trip on a miniature train, and it ground through toetoe and sunlight and tunnels and often when it jerked out the dark there would be a bright bank built of bottles, blue and green, or clear and amber, a spangling slope of domed glass light, and the light on it, trapped and flickering and swollen, made the DTs look beautiful. It felt like being in a cathedral. Except it was a cathedral glued into clay with glass leftover from her own emptiness.
Don’t worry. I’m giving her a reason for her drinking. Or her weed. It’s not what you’re thinking. She’s the strong one.
I wanted to write about being the strong one because I’m not. That’s where Gabriella came in.
As you were leaving, you paused at the slider and said, Don’t you have anything else to say for yourself? Behind you the trees were stickering the window with crunched gold leaves. I didn’t. You left. And that’s when I felt Gabriella, on the back of my neck, answering.
Answering.
I’m thinking the ash-blond hair in the bin could be tugged from the brush of a beautiful sunbathing neighbour, one who spreads out the tropical tones of a towel meant for oceans, or no, a padded Li-Lo that is see-through metallic with vertical seams and blown up through a squeezy clear nipple. Gabriella could remember how, towards the end, she used to wheel her husband out onto the balcony to let him ogle because it no longer mattered. The roof where the neighbour stretches out should be black (that fibro topping, what’s that called, that gritty seal?) and spiked with aerials like post-modern Xmas trees, and the neighbour should slowly tweak parts of her bikini, just straps off at first, then nudge down pants, and glisten. Once they would have fought if she’d found him staring. She would have stomped and batted closed the blinds, so the fight would have had the sound of blinds clattering out light, the corny tap of them swinging and plinking. The neighbour could have been seen face-down (slow pan into an ash-blond close-up) with a laugh puffed knowingly onto the back of hands that smelt of coconut oil and engagement ring – but that would depend on point of view.
You’re the strong one. I want Gabriella to have your strength. I want her to lift her husband in and out of the chair (in memory, because in the now of her story, in the bottles glancing light round her apartment, her husband is gone, and the bottles make the echo gone, gone – or maybe that’s too much), and be able to take the stale feel of his skin, the clamminess of his deadweight. The spindly hair between his nipples. The blueness of his elbows. The given-up
smudge of his bellybutton. I want her to hate and love his torso as she washes it. A slow awkward swab. With a lime-green flannel she dabs into a tin bowl of tepid water laced with antiseptic, a chemical splotch she tips in, 5 ml, and stares at, frilling out into the fluid, holding solid in a small pale clot at first, like a foetus, then tremoring out, dissolving into ripples. He’s hard to roll. He’s hard to clean. He’s hard to talk to. It’s a bowl from a set of nesting bowls that she once used to mix him a pancake breakfast, after he’d first stayed the night, and she sees herself humming half-dressed in the after-sex kitchen, barefoot and skittish with getting loved-up, whisking the batter with whimsical flicks, checking the notches on the edge of the small tin dish to dust in the perfect ingredients, all the time thinking of his body, a-sprawl in her bed, which she would feed, teasing him with the spoon (oh, that smutty syrup all over Mother’s silver), snatching kisses through his carefree chomps, then tote the tray off to the kitchen, tiptoe back and straddle. I want her to spend a long time pushing the lime-green flannel into the solution. Watching it billow. Wringing it. I want her to spend hours refusing to sob.
You’ll say the wheelchair is too much. But he needs to really be broken, the husband. He can’t just be in pain for nothing. Like me.
There’s no ‘I’ in pain. It looks like there is. But that’s a trick. You can’t use it. There’s no narrator. You can’t say ‘I’m in pain’. It doesn’t work. It all comes out sounding like teenage self-pity. You’re talking like a teenage girl, you said to me last night, when I said I was done with it, the pain had finally won, I wanted out. And all I could think of was to drink my way out, drink myself gone. You were right. You see? First-person pain always sounds like such a teenage girl.
That’s why I need Gabriella. I need her to be the strong one, fifty-something. But also, she can drink.
Or maybe she gets the weed from a student. Maybe she teaches writing, like you, and one of her students slips her the weed, or not even slips it, because it’s not like it’s a big deal to them. They laugh at her, camouflaging it, ramming its baggie down in a used envelope black-block-lettered INTERNAL MAIL, and zipping and flipping compartments in her satchel so it’s stashed with an old bike padlock and half-squashed tampons. I can see this student – she’s an acid waif, ultra-thin, with a blasé swathe of hair she trims herself, in chic deconstructionist chops. She’s got more talent in her little finger than Gabrielle could ever muster – she writes loud mean beautiful poems with timebomb images and shitty doubletakes on manifestos, and every stanza ends in a luminous bored-with-her-own-entitlement sneer. She’s a genius. And Gabrielle’s embarrassed to have to pretend to be teaching her – in workshops she doesn’t mutter the astonishment that is the real reaction that detonates her sternum when she reads the latest of this girl’s poems. She feels it would be too harsh on the other students, who work very hard on their pedestrian imagery, who strain to tidy their quotidian stanzas, pushing round flecks of punctuation and nodding at Gabriella earnestly, yep, cut out adverbs, check. She’s so jealous of the lines she can’t breathe – they float on the page in offhand sophistication, their self-reflexive floweriness glinting with bite, and once, on her bus home, while the driver brakes at lights, she sees the student reflected in a bar, and her tiny expostulating pose at the table with a beer bottle ticking in just two fingers is as bulletproof as her poems, as slender and high-IQ and impossible to wound. A bitter girl that’s come from a very good home. But she doesn’t smirk at Gabrielle. She calls her Gabe like she respects her, when she could have just coined the easy jibe of Gab. Lobbed across the classroom, yo, Gab. She acts fond of her. She slips her a little sleeve of weed to fend off her sleeplessness.
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