Author: Elisabeth

The blanket was scratchy under my chin. Alone in the dark. Before I could separate my sheet from its bunched-up position round my shoulders to act as a buffer between me and the scratch.

The way a mother might settle a small child. 

An ache landed in my gut. It thrummed in my ears as though trying to tell me something was wrong with my body. Something so bad I curled my toes and scrunched my eyes tight.

I knew, as sure as the sun dropped behind the horizon at night, as sure as the grass in winter was green, as sure as my fingernails were filthy, I had cancer. 

‘A lump or thickening in the breast or elsewhere are early warning signs,’ the man on TV said. ‘Don’t ignore them.’

Every day his solemn voice burled into the room from the black and white screen. But who could cure me? Who could I tell? 

I was alone in this bedroom, waiting for my sister to arrive. Four years older, she could stay up late. Only when she came into the room and turned on the light full blare I was meant to be asleep and not notice the sudden rush of glory be to Gods in a room that was earlier sheathed in darkness.

Mostly my experience of my body was one of well-functioning ease such I could forget it existed until the pull to visit a toilet. 

‘Number ones or number twos?’ we kids called to one another as we left the game to attend to our bodily needs there in the outside toilet. The wooden coffin shaped construction beside the woodshed, which we never used for wood. 

When I went inside this shed and smelled the dark earth under my feet I thought of tombs and underground caves. Chinks of light filtered through the slatted boards which formed its coat, and otherwise beyond the tin roof there was nothing to see. Spider webs in corners, slats wider spaced for the one small window and then darkness. 

There was no purpose to this room. My parents never collected firewood. The briquette man came instead and hurled sacks of glistening lumps of black coal into the laundry chute to stoke our fires, while our woodshed stood silent.

Sad to be so unused. 

Like my body.

Only my body was useful for walking and running and eating. For hopping and jumping, for skipping from concrete slab to concrete slab in hopscotch and for jumping over the rope when we swung it back and forth in the back yard.

Defecation, only we called it pooping, was a mystery to me, though I could do it.  

One day as a ten-year-old, after we had played near the power station across from the East Camberwell railway where the urge was so great I had to use the toilet attached to this building. It was not a place a sane person should enter.

But when you’re ten and have no other choice. This room reeked of sanitiser solution. There were chunks of yellow streaked with a silvery glow in the corners near the bowl and I gagged at the rank odour of menthol or camphor or whatever other poison they put into these savage pills, meant to keep our germs away. 

I imagined these balls as giant lollies. Anything that reminded me of a sweet, even one left on the ground and licked by ants, was a temptation to me. But I knew enough not to eat the poison balls, just by their smell. 

I thought of the brown bottle in our laundry with a skull and cross bones etched onto the dark glass, which my sister told me I must never open. The fumes alone were enough to kill you. And I wondered why my parents should keep such a bottle under the laundry trough, if they had no intention to murder. Things like this existed in the world and who was I to know, other than to avoid.

There was so much else to avoid, but my body did not let me shove out the poo lump that day. It strained to come through the tiny hole in the back of my behind. And it hurt. It hurt so bad I thought something was wrong with me. 

I pushed anyway and eventually after my face had turned red with the effort and every muscle was clenched, I moved that lump from inside and ran back to the others to play.

Something of its journey stayed behind inside my body. A trace of an ache between my legs in the rear end. I longed for it to disappear.

Much as I longed for the pains in my ears that came upon me in wintertime when my nose thickened with snot and my head filled with fog. These were the pains that slit like a knife through paper. Sharp and insistent and again nothing to be done, other than wait for it to pass. 

So much in this body to wish myself past.

When my teeth began to crumble in my mouth and bits fell away whenever I ate, I rubbed my tongue along the craggy remains and wished they did not exist at all. 

If only our bodies did not cause such trouble. I rubbed Macleans toothpaste over the places where the holes were deepest and lay in bed on other nights hoping for the soothing menthol which they talked about on television, again during an advertisement. 

A woman dunked a piece of chalk into a jar of ink and the chalk turned blue. Somehow our teeth could do this when the enamel, a plastic-like coating on the outside, wore away.

All the enamel on my teeth must have worn away because I had what the woman on the television called cavities. I knew cavities were holes. Holes in my teeth. 

Holes in my head and a body that ached every night and stopped me from sleeping much as the ache in my belly stopped me from sleeping this night.

And I thought about my mother who was expecting. Or so my sister had told me. My sister four years older than me and the font of all knowledge. When your mother is expecting you know very soon there will be another body in the house. Another little head with eyes and a mouth like a wound. 

And babies cried long into the night in a way I had learned never to do. My body I trained into silence. A body under my command if only the toothpaste did its job or the hole in my bum was wide enough to shove out the poos. 

If only my ears too were clear of gunk, the wax, honeycomb gold that built up inside. It must have given me the pain. I wished I could be like my mother who went to the doctor’s to have her ears washed out. 

After she came from his room she smiled as if she had suddenly discovered something new. Sound. She could hear again and had no more excuses for ignoring us, only her hands were full of washing and cooking and cleaning and her belly was full of new baby who would soon join us and there would be one more bed to fill, one more person to consider in this household full of legs and arms and bodies. 

It was enough to manage my own. And worst of all, the two biggest bodies in the household, my mother and father, their stink, the magnified noises that came from them when they went to the toilet. 

Yuk to the idea of growing into being one of them. I wanted to stay small forever. And waited in my bed for the pain to pass.