Tag: fiction

The skin of words

‘She was born with the winter in her bones.’ Kate Atkinson

Aurelia, thin and angular, pulled her socks to her knees. She wore them over thick stockings for extra warmth under drill trousers. Work ready trousers so she need not worry over unwanted holes in the fabric. 

Her mother had raised her to work, beginning as a four-year-old and first-born girl in a family where babies arrived year after year. She could change a nappy and prop a bottle on her baby brother’s chest as she folded clothes with her spare hand. She learned fast to keep order and during this time came to resent the mess piling around them in this overfull house of babies and neglect. 

Whatever happened to Aurelia when she was ten I cannot say but just like that, her ability to remember stopped one day overnight. One day she was a child who could recite her times tables, wipe bench tops clean, set out knives and forks in correct order, enough for seven, clear dishes, wash and stack them away. The next day she stumbled over every movement. She dropped plates, smashed in pieces on the floor and could not remember where the dustpan and brush lived to sweep up the shards. 

School became a nightmare, a fog of ignorance and the nuns reported Aurelia must be lacking something upstairs. Best she leaves school when she hits fourteen, they said. She could still be useful at home. 

Only Aurelia was no longer useful at home. She was a burden on her parents, a child who weighed them down with her slowness. 

A disease had crept into Aurelia’s bones. Some maladies of mind that left her grasping for ideas. It squashed her memory and the slower she became the more her mother pondered her fate. It was never a matter of love. 

Love was not a commodity within this family of many heads, legs and arms all pistoning in unison to get through the tasks of life, the cooking, the eating, the washing, the cleaning. The walk to school, the books to read, the tasks to be completed outside in the woodshed, the gathering of firewood for the older boys, and stitching of holes in fabric for the girls below Aurelia who had not yet lost their minds. 

Aurelia’s mother feared this might turn out to be the fate of all her daughters. One after the other when they came of age, nine or ten, overnight these girls would shift their weight in the world and disappear.

It had happened to Aurelia’s mother, too, only she managed to hold onto a few shreds of memory, enough to get her past the end of her school days at fourteen, enough to rote learn the rudiments of house care, enough to find a husband. A burly tall man who was not unkind but who did not know any more than Aurelia’s mother that small children need love if they are to burst into bright stars that glow warm. If they are to grow into minds that can think and feel, that can run, hop and skip like John and Betty in the first-grade readers. 

Aurelia’s mother knew there had been other possibilities for her, but once she married and the first seeds of a baby swelled inside, there was no turning back. 

Then there was Aurelia. And her disappearance. 

Her mother then imagined a Hansel and Gretel story for her daughter. She, the wicked stepmother, for no actual mother would abandon her child, however forlorn. And she cajoled her burly husband into taking Aurelia to the government house where cast off children were processed. Leaving her there.

Aurelia in a fog in the great hall at the centre of a crumbling mansion where bureaucrats took details of children lined up like ten pins one after the other ready for life to bowl them over. 

But Aurelia had no details to report. Aurelia could not remember. She was born with the winter already in her bones and although she wore clothes that kept her warm enough, thick stockings, socks to her knees over drill trousers and all under a great coat for the out of doors, her insides were laced over in memory loss. 

Aurelia was the raw forgotten part of her mother’s life. Her mother knew this and tried to rid herself of the unknown and unremembered by casting her daughter aside.

But Aurelia would rise again like the characters in Roman myths who once abandoned on hillsides as babies, refused to die. 

Let us hope Aurelia meets a similar fate. We cannot abandon her to words on the page, to the life of our imaginations, to the skin of words and of language. Aurelia is our memory of all that is forgotten. She needs us to hold her tight. 

Jesus among the pigeons

When he was a boy, Freddy collected birds. Something about the way they travelled through the skies, their wings unclipped and free, offered solace within his own small, trapped world. He could be a Jesus among the pigeons, or the old lady in Mary Poppins who fed pigeons on a foggy London Street. 

He could feed birds, keep them safe. He never considered his decision to confine his birds, curtailed their natural impulses, any more than he considered his own servitude a problem. It just was. And when I say servitude, Freddy was not alone in the style of life bequeathed to him at birth. 

The son of a postman who spent everyday cycling through suburban streets, a sack full of correspondence between one person to another, which he delivered devotedly at each door. 

Freddy’s father was a loyal servant of her Majesty Elizabeth, the Queen of England, even as his world, his newspaper rounds through Newport and Williamtown on the other side of the Yarra River from where a better class of people lived, was nothing like hers. 

Freddy’s mother stayed at home. She tended to their small workman’s cottage, kept it tidy and tried her best to turn it into the castle of her childhood dreams before Freddy came along and life became more haphazard, money harder to find and the everyday struggles to find the best quality but cheapest cuts of meat to put on her table required she take in other people’s garments in need of resurrection, hemming, or repair. All to offset the family’s limited income.

From earliest days, Freddy dreamed of freedom. As soon as he was old enough to take off on his bicycle, and old enough to travel the streets without parental supervision, he was gone. At age ten he began paper rounds offering a few coins in return for early rising like the birds. 

Once he had money of his own, Freddy took to saving. When the world woke up on Saturday mornings, later than usual, after his regular paper round, he rode to the Victoria Market close by the hospital where he was born and visited the live animal market where farmers sold sheep, goats, and egg laying hens. 

Freddy loved the bantams. Tiny red feathered creatures with claws that reminded him of the tendrils on an ancient vine. Freddy carried his bantam in a shoe box strapped to the back of his bike with holes punched in the lid for air. 

The cost of one bantam ate a whole week’s pay, but Freddy did not mind. If he spent his money there was nothing left for his mother to demand by way of board. Her motherhood had stopped with Freddy. Unable to bear more children, she became a stickler for order at home. 

It was as much as Freddy could do to persuade her to let him take up a small corner of the yard against the grey paling fence where he built his first cage. With wire he found at the local tip and nails stolen from his father’s workshop, he fashioned an aviary. 

His father at least trusted Freddy with his tools and was pleased to see his son showing signs of following in Jesus’s footsteps. He might after all become a carpenter and not live the more impoverished life of a postman.

Freddy’s bantam was lonely and although Freddy longed for eggs so he could demonstrate the productivity of his venture, his bird was unyielding. For weeks he saved enough to re-visit the market and buy his bantam a mate. Two birds would have to be better than one. 

He had not bargained on any animosity or cock fighting between his birds given the man at the market promised they were hens and therefore unlikely to squabble. They did not though they clucked about conditions and Freddy imagined they were not happy with the size of their coop. 

He resolved to make it bigger and more secluded from the elements. He found tin sheeting at the tip and unused wood palings from a building site to build up walls on one side and a roof. For the rest, the ever-available wire meshing let in light and air and sun. 

His birds were happier. And Freddy was delighted knowing his birds were contented for all their clucking and ongoing refusals to yield eggs. In time, he thought. In time.

One day Freddy returned home from school to the sight of the red fire engine parked in his street bang smack in front of his house. A thick black hose snaked up the side path beyond the front door and out to the back yard. A plu  me of smoke drifted over the skyline. The air was acrid.

No one could say how it happened. The weather had warmed and the sun more intense over that final summer. Someone must have tossed an unfinished cigarette into the grass behind his house in a lot that had not been mowed for some time, dried out with the heat.

Freddy’s birds were no more, and Freddy’s heart broke apart, the way young hearts are prone to break when their best efforts are destroyed.

Freddy stopped collecting birds thereafter. And his life narrowed to one in which he dared not venture too widely. His life became even more circumscribed than before.

Until the hormones that coursed through his body as a twelve-year-old compelled him to try again. And that’s a whole other story.

I shall never be a fiction writer. I am too anchored in my memories as artefacts of my life, and even as the story of Freddy has its roots in my memory of one of my brothers who collected birds as a boy until the cage burned down, the backdrop to Freddy’s life is fictional and leaves me sensing its total implausibly.

As usual I have written more to this story which has slipped from view.

When our first-born daughter was ten years old, friends asked her to take care of their two African love birds which their daughters kept in a cage in their upstairs bedroom in a terrace in Carlton.

While they went on a holiday to Coffs Harbour. My daughter was delighted to share her room with these birds for all their incessant twittering and mess making. She loved to watch them and imagine they were more humanoid than bird and conducted long conversations after school. 

At night she threw a heavy cloth over the cage to encourage sleep and silence. A cloth so effective it was as if someone had switched off the birds in a movie. 

One Saturday morning my husband and I helped our daughter take the cage into our back garden for the purpose of cleaning it. I cannot remember who, parent or child, made the mistake of pulling out the base while the birds sat cosy on their perch above. Which one of us failed to recognise without a base the birds were free to dive low and beyond the confines of their cage.

All day long we left the cage cleaned and filled with fresh water and seed in the hope they might return. They never did. My husband added to my sadness by telling me, though not our daughter, such birds had little chance of survival out in the world ill equipped for a life of freedom. While our daughter comforted herself in the belief they were free at last.

Our friends were sanguine and although we promised to replace the birds with two others identical, the older of our friends’ daughters had decided on their return she was done with birds.

Too messy, too much of responsibility and not much fun after all. 

Like Freddy she gave up on the birds until adolescence when she like the birds would begin to flex her wings to fly free.