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2007-11-10T08:35:00.001-08:00

Imperious gusts scour the clefts and folds of the mountains the old house wears as a shawl.
It and the village below lay hushed, waiting for the spring thaw.

‘Send someone Mistress…what if she dies? It will not sit well with the village. He's due back at any time now and―’

Fatime cuffs her aside as callously as she might swat a sticky black fly—servants and insects sharing roughly the same level of importance and nuisance value in her privileged world.
‘Shut up interfering old witch! If you are so concerned―then go…and may Allah snatch you up before I ever, have to lay eyes upon your miserable bag of bones again.’

Jamfize pulls her threadbare gown about her closely and leaves the comfort of her mistress's quarters. The subordinates of this coterie titter and simper in the clinging warmth of the braziers dotted amongst the rich carpets and embroidered pillows. They had all heard the muffled screams and desperate pleas in that barbarous tongue—but noting no change in the smooth surface of the moon of Fatime’s face; ignore them. After a while, there was silence.

Little more than creaking bones held together by a wrinkled girdle of flesh; Jamfize shuffles arthritically to the woman's room. In an unused wing of the ancient complex, there, she’d been thrust and forgotten. From time to time someone scurried to the infidel’s door with scraps, knocked; and ran quickly back, followed by a stream of abuse in a babbling language, like angry gulls striking from the air at their quarry.

She holds her breath as she approaches the door. It is unnaturally quiet. The woman has acute hearing and should be cursing her. Carefully lifting the latch, she opens it a crack. The appalling cold has caused the oil in its hinges to freeze so that a sound like the doors of Hell creaking open, complained and ricocheted in a room more butcher’s cold room than bedroom.

At first, in the bluish gloom, it is difficult to make out where the woman is. The room is a confection of ice; spiders’ webs bedecking the corners with icy mantillas, the chair—a snowy rococo of curlicues, the dust, glittering like diamonds. She lay curled upon the sparkling counterpane; her body shimmering where exposed.

Jamfize hurries to the bed and smacks the marmoreal arms and legs, but she is either unconscious or dead. It is only now she notices the blood—frozen and sparkling like rubies on the sheets. A sound—like that made by a dusty cushion when sat upon; issues from the woman, spurring Jamfize to drag her upright and slap her more violently. Her heart knocks wildly inside its scarecrow cage when she sees the tiny bundle the woman has vainly tried to keep warm.

A miniature, wizened and pinched blue face stares up from a bonnet festooned by icicles—
a murderous decoration, more exquisitely beautiful than the finest Spanish lace.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Sister Immaculata Conception raps her short 'encouragement' cane on my desk, forcing me to make direct eye contact with her piggy red orbs set in a face filmed with perspiration—her wimple as tight as her lips. My desk adjoins her own, a last resort after exhausting all other forms of 'encouragement'. She feels that by separating me, in an isle apart, and at a desk immediately in front of hers, she can better discourage me from my habitual chattering.

The desk, a victim of countless acts of childhood abuse, creaks each millimetre of space I wrest from Tommy. Drowning flies buzz sporadically before succumbing to the murky depths of a well—more insect matter than ink. Tommy Watt has a gammy leg and that makes him mad. I don’t mean angry, I mean mad. Mad as a cut snake, mad as a hatter, mad. Maybe he’d sucked the wrong end of a thermometer? No one knows why; no one cares less. Rumour has it that it's because of a fall—a fall after a collision; a collision with his dad’s fist. He never speaks to anyone and we don’t speak to him―or behind his back. We never look directly at him, only from the corners of our eyes. Sometimes, when I’m daydreaming, I can sense Tommy, there... in my peripheral vision.

We have to write a short essay about our family's origins. Everyone has to pretend to be giving Sister Immaculata Conception or Bloody Immy as we privately call her, our complete attention. Everybody that is, except for Tommy and Philomena. Bloody Immy is a lesbian. Everybody knows that all nuns are lesbians, everybody who’s catholic that is. If they don’t, we bring them up to speed. Why else would women want to shack up with each other and shave their heads?

At play lunch we watch her—tittering behind our hands; supposedly on playground duty watching out for our collective good. Instead, her eyes slyly following Philomena’s slightly yellowed cottontails. Every morning all the girls —presumably the ugly girls; have to keep kneeling after morning prayers for tunic inspection, box pleats have to touch the floor or out comes the “quick unpick” and, the encouragement cane. Philomena however, blouses her tunic over her belt so that it is a short as a roman toga, allowing tantalizing glimpses of tanned thighs and knickers. Once, when I followed Bloody Immy’s eyes to Philomena’s shapely arse, I saw that the elastic was so shot, her actual bum cheek was showing; all golden brown like her legs, and sniggered at the thought that she too suffers from hungry knickers syndrome but wondered at the same time why it was so tanned. Did Philomena dispense with wearing underwear at all outside of school hours? A few years later in high school, I watched the Marist Brothers’ boys being mesmerized, by the slow crossing and uncrossing of her legs and realized I was right. Now she wasn’t bothering to wear knickers at all.

Philomena is a natural ash-blonde with long cat-like green eyes, her lashes and, what I suspect is a plucked mono-brow, black. As I sat up the back of the bus that day, I noticed her clitoris protruding from a nest of glossy black hair. Until the rest of us became interested in boys, Philomena did us all a public service. The boys were slow to slang off at us, as was the bus driver; who drove white knuckled and silent, his eyes darting between the road and his rear vision mirror.

Back when I didn’t know they were called clitorises, I didn’t even know what they looked like. Based on Philomena’s however, I thought that in time mine would grow into something resembling my infant cousin’s willy—about as big as my pinkie. I tried to find it in the bathtub one night and when I couldn’t, instructed Annie to look.

‘Nup—nothing, just some pink folds and a hole. Maybe it grows later,’ she speculated. Maybe. Philomena was a fast developer... she even has tits.

Today Bloody Immy is sermonizing about the courage and hardships our convict forebears faced in colonizing “terra nullius”. She points slowly and with emphasis, to all the pale red bits on the pull-down map of the world, Commonwealth Standard Issue, 1949. Proud British colonies, like angry boils on the globe’s bum. In neat, tin soldier rows, boys to the right, girls naturally to the left; she instructs us, one by one, to point out and enunciate clearly, where our ancestors hail from. Proudly; smug Anglo-Saxon angels point to Ireland, England, Wales and Scotland. Disapproving frowns and suppressed giggles accompany hurriedly pointed out Poland and the Ukraine. Hoping to be reprieved by the play-lunch bell, I manage the last position in what is now a very short line, a habit I still have of trying to put off the inevitable.

Trying to appear as nonchalant as is humanly possible for an eleven year old to effect,
I approach both the peeling, fly-shat map and Sister Immaculata, who is doing her impression of a vulture, hopping awkwardly, arms akimbo, habit flapping.

I point.

‘Pay attention and point properly!’ she says through clenched teeth.

‘I am’, I squeak.

‘Well, there is nothing there... where you are pointing.’

‘Y ―yes there is,’ I stammer.

‘Well, Miss Smarty Pants, please read to the class what is written there!’

‘A’.

‘A! And what does A stand for?’

‘Albania’.

‘Humph. Never heard of it. Must be terribly unimportant to be denoted by just the letter A’.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

It is a burden, to have a mother that is ‘exotic’.

I, like every other child, want to be...

like every other child.

My Albanian ancestors bequeathed a suitably fair complexion, summer-blonde hair and
regulation-blue eyes. My poverty―not uncommon amongst my peers; my accent, my strine...worked on relentlessly until perfected, but my mother? I was ashamed of my beautiful, brown mother. Creamy olive skin, nut-brown eyes, mahogany hair―a profusion of curls; her laughter a trilling, chocolate rill, her figure―lithe yet curvy; her tiny waist accentuated by tight knee-length skirts or fashionable fly-front pants. Her English good, her vocabulary better than many native born, but her accent...the way her mouth moves when enunciating the letters we so painstakingly flatten. The sniggers―when sheets sound like shits.

I tear up the notes that inform and invite parents to attend school concerts, meetings with teachers and open days. I become a forger par excellence explaining “her inability to attend”.
I cite as excuses: sick relatives, appointments with doctors and of course; the need to work. Sometimes, it cannot be avoided.

In the sea of ship-shape mothers, the square utilitarian forms of regulation tugboat mothers—mine is a sloop. A slender vessel built for speed, her brass polished, her canvas coloured. She cuts and tacks through the proper mother flotilla and weighs anchor at my side. I refuse to acknowledge her presence, instead, pretend that I am waiting for someone else: more suitable.

Of this peccavi―to my lasting shame; she has never once, made reference.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

They could have gone to Argentina or North America.

Nonno’s second cousin owned a restaurant in New York, and Argentina’s economy was booming. The kids wanted to see kangaroos. Nonna resisted, but was coerced eventually with promises that they would soon return to her beloved Italia— she died of a broken heart and pancreatic cancer.

She met Nonno when he was a proud young recipient of a Mussolini scholarship. Her parents’ townhouse was in street leading to the Academy. Every morning, he and the other strutting black-shirted students, walked slowly, arrogantly and exuding as much machismo as possible, through the quiet Roman streets, trying to catch the eye and admiration of the pretty girls hanging out of windows and balconies. Although not tall, his rather reserved manner and somewhat glamorous looks of grey-blue eyes, blonde wavy hair and proud eagle profile—all enhanced beautifully by the swirling black cape and shining boots; singled him out for her attention. She thought him ‘interestingly different’ from the others, and positioned herself gracefully by the wrought-iron fence each day in time for his passing.

Annie and I shared her bed for two whole weeks when we got the flu so bad that we had to
stay home from school. Several times each night, she’d squat over a chamber pot kept under
the sagging mattress and we’d hear the thunderous letdown of urine from her stretched bladder. Nonna had five living children of whom Mum was number two. She’d had however, several other pregnancies: full-term and miscarriages; that had taken their toll on her body. But, it was Zio Bartolomeo who had done the most damage to her reproductive organs. Zio Barty’s birth-weight was a whopping fifteen pounds and the women attending her labour were white-lipped with empathic fear. Nonna felt close to death when a midwife from an outlying village arrived and instructed her to follow her directions to the letter, or her uterus may well accompany his placenta. Barty was born without a single laceration to his mother’s battle weary vulva; his testicles however, were blue and swollen to the size of footballs.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

My mother gained weight quickly in the first few months after her arrival in Australia —the bananas being large, cheap and plentiful. A pre-Australia photograph shows a skinny girl in a black wool bathing suit, frowning in concentration steadfastly at the viewer. My step‑father carries in his wallet, a faded dog-eared picture of her smiling radiantly. A Mediterranean beauty beneath a tree of spreading habit in full bloom, the earlier angles plumped out, she wears a crumpled cotton frock, a plaster cast on her right arm, and the boundless optimism of youth.

She didn’t speak until the age of five and then she surprised everyone by speaking in both her parents’ languages. She’d simply not had anything too important to say before then. Her father would sometimes sit her on the front bar of his heavy, black pushbike and take her with him to the markets— a dazzling cacophony of sounds, colours and smells. He would select the plumpest, most golden banana, and place it in her eager, dimpled hands, knowing that she would make it last, savouring every precious morsel of this wondrous foreign fruit. And, while he would make the purchases of the most pungent cheeses, tartest olives and youngest lamb, she would settle herself next to his bicycle and watch people. She still loves to watch people and many times we've sat together in the busiest streets of Sydney to comment on, and be entertained by, the passers-by.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

My father was twenty seven and a virgin when he married my mother. She was eighteen and not. Well educated despite the circumstances of her life, Mum was forced—after a brief stint as a nurse, which did not suit her disposition; to take up a job in a light-globe factory where my father was a foreman. It was lust at first sight. Each day he sent his pining thoughts scurrying down the one way street of love, only to end up in the cul de sac of my mother’s response―which was as empty as her purse. Nothing, niente, nix.

Like so many other displaced persons, my mother had arrived in Australia with not much more than the clothes she stood in. Every member of the family, who could, worked and handed over their entire weekly wage. Doled out from this was her daily bus fare, the rest an obligatory contribution to the family’s ‘fresh start in the wilderness fund’.

My father’s observations over the ensuing months―of a limited wardrobe and home-packed lunches; gave rise to an idea he felt she could not refuse. Despite his spindly frame, he rode the largest legal road bike; a black Triumph. Pulling up at the bus stop, he inquired whether she might like to save her bus fare and get a lift home from work. Initially the query was met with a stony-faced negative. Each day he gnawed at her resistance until she accepted, on the proviso that she be dropped a short distance away from her parents’ house―she did not want to give the neighbours a reason to talk.

She saved these small amounts until it was enough to purchase a pair of nylon stockings―that she put on, only after leaving for work. She started to relax behind him, hanging on tight when he leant into the corners. Emboldened, one day he asked if she would mind if he swung past his home first, as his mother was waiting for a parcel he carried. She said it would be alright, if indeed his mother was at home, and if the detour was brief. To her relief, he was telling the truth and she was touched to see the obviously loving bond between mother and son.

Matilda asked her in for a cuppa and thereafter the visits became regular. Matilda actually approved of and liked, the dark ‘fresh off the boat’ girl who only spoke a few words of English,
for reasons that―like so many other details of her life; remain unclear. How Mum’s parents found out was never ascertained. They refused to believe the innocent nature of these visits and demanded nothing less: than he make a decent woman of her. Both Matilda and Dad were delighted.

Their marriage lasted fifteen years, legally speaking. Of that tumultuous period, six were spent battling in the courts over each other and us, the rest divided up into chunks of ‘let’s try it again for: our kids, our parents, our immortal souls’ sake’, and trial separations. Annie and I spent our early childhood as ground troops in the battle field of their marriage or yo yoing between Pop and Matey’s or Nonno and Nonna’s homes.

From my thick-walled nest in the high country, I look down on the dustbowls of childhood.
Of course...there were oases, where we chilled out and fattened up before being sent back to the front.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Pop and Matey’s marriage was not a love match; it was arranged with the best of intentions. Bram, the youngest of twelve, fled Ireland in his brothers’ wake, clutching only a violin. Matilda was native born of mother country stock, meeting all four prerequisites—as applicant for position of help meet and mother. She was virtuous; hymen intact, Roman Catholic, of Celtic stock and, fertile. Bram likewise was diligent, hardworking and clean of both body and mind―this requiring topping and tailing every night before bed and total immersion once weekly during the warmer months; and no lustful thoughts save those employed in his duties to procreate and swell the congregation. Of course he may have been a little more diligent in these duties had Matilda been less plain in both appearance and personality.

If Matilda had been an animal she would have been a cow―not a frisky, moist-eyed Friesian but a stolid, cud-chewing Jersey. She did not test the barbed wire yearning for greener pastures; she was content within the limitations of her paddock. She performed her duties well enough: starching his collars, darning his socks, airing his Sunday suit. She was even tempered: greeting him politely each new day and planting a chaste kiss on his cheek each night before retiring to her room. She kept herself clean, although, he never saw her naked―always performing his duties at the appointed times in absolute darkness, under both the bedclothes and her encompassing red flannel nightdress. But, if he tried to engage her in light conversation; in the affairs of the wider world, in the arts, or even in sharing a joke– she seemed to turn inwards, becoming opaque; a bland smile affixed to her heavy-jawed bovine face.

Bram―hailing from County Cork had an intriguing Gaelic lilt, violet eyes and a full head of blue-black hair. His job on the Railways took him to many country towns and far flung outposts of white settlement, where lonely woman laughed hungrily at his blarney. He kept his straying to a few meaningful winks, mindful of the flames of the pit―waiting for those who succumb to temptations of the flesh; in the afterlife. Though he did not stain the sheets of these sunburnt, freckled, independent women, he shared his stored-up dreams and aspirations, his fiddle playing ―for Matilda did not approve of music outside of church; and his love of literature: James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and D.H.Lawrence.

He was away for a month at a time, home for week. But employment was scarce, and these sojourns provided the intellectual escape that enabled him to stay enlisted in his duties as husband. It did impact however on the ultimate size of his family. His three sons were born a decade apart. My father, the last―Matilda’s ‘change of life’ baby; was deemed an invalid and spoiled forever by his mother’s fawning. It was an even spread, both Sean and Jo favouring
their Da in the looks department and their Mater in temperament. Dad looked like Matilda―pale, pear-shaped and hair the colour of a newly minted penny; but intelligent and restless.

At the age of nine he contracted his first of several bouts of Rheumatic Fever. Matilda had never got over him leaving her to attend school, and used this as the excuse for him to never return. She was a good mother to Sean and Joe―in the material sense; but their physical resemblance to Bram prevented her from displaying any real affection. As infants she held them at arms length, doing only what was necessary when it involved corporeal contact. When Paddy was born, it ignited a never to be quenched love for him and a desire to always be with him.

As a distant father Bram watched his two older sons grow up wild, finding the warmth they needed elsewhere―marrying young, their offspring close in age, cleaving ever closer to their spouses’ families in the pursuit of familial normalcy. He also watched ―with growing distaste; the cloying dependency of his wife upon the affections of their youngest son. When the child was barely a year old, Bram arrived home a day earlier than usual, and letting himself in quietly to surprise his wife ―who seemed to have a new lease on life of late; found her bathing the infant in a tin tub set up in the warmth of the back sunroom. It was thrilling to watch his wife of three decades nuzzling her face into the chuckling boy’s abdomen, apply talcum to his chubby creases, place his squirming toes in her mouth to bite off his toenails and to tenderly prise the hardened nose dirt from his nostrils with her tongue. Long dormant passion flared within him and stepping into the room he slipped a hand under her arm and cupped her breast. Her flesh rippled and repelled the offending member―as the shivering flank of a horse might a fly. She screamed in outrage.

‘How could you think of such a thing…in the company of an...innocent’, she said, spitting the words out with such fury, his face was speckled by a precipitation of saliva, her face transparent for once—transparent with loathing for him.

Shocked, he left the house, returning once a month to hand over his pay packet, attend Mass with her―to keep up appearances; and be informed of the milestones in his sons’ lives.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Mum had been leaving Dad since before I was born—or at least soon afterwards. I slept between them as contraception, which mostly worked, as she only fell pregnant once between Annie and me. It—joined the ranks of the other lucky ‘abortees’, those who were stubborn―like me and Annie and later on Maddie; kept a watchful eye on our mother’s person. Despite our chill disapproval and reluctance to leave her ever-lengthening nipples, Dad would make good an incursion into the enemies land, every so often.

There was no help, financial or spiritual, for single mums then. No government benefits. Besides, she was a Catholic married to a Catholic—that way led to excommunication and the fires of hell. Some enlightened soul said that there is no such thing as Hell; rather it is a state of mind. I’d have to agree. Too late for Mum though, she opted for the roasting decades ago. It was easier to kiss Satan’s arse than the Pope’s ring.

After a string of escapes and tearful roundups; stints as a barmaid and a meat packer, she met and hooked up with Russell. He’d left school at fifteen and worked at the abattoir since. It was karma for this mastermind of “Ned Kelly” cats. Here he honed—like his knives; his attitude toward all living things...us included.

I was twelve years old straining on the dunny late one night, when she clambered in the window—thirty two and still afraid of her parents. She sat on the edge of the bathtub and blubbered. I discreetly wiped my bum and asked, ‘What’s wrong?’

She’d been going to the Drive-in with Russell and—as he would skite for years afterwards; for the price of a bottle of coke and a packet of chewies, he’d dob it on her in the back of his
panel van.

‘I think I’m pregnant Bubby,’ she said.

Great I thought, nodding my head dumbly, now we’re all fucked.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I used to imagine that Russell was a troll, and that his likewise misshapen parents and sister were also trolls, disguised as humans.

They were obese in the days when obesity was rare. Their body odour was individually, rank—collectively it immobilized and rendered senseless all visitors. Their skin was both oily and flaky; their upper backs, necks, scalps and faces crowded with boils and acne vulgaris. Lank scanty hair fell listlessly over small flat skulls and thick muscular necks. Large noses with fleshy tips wandered crookedly between small watery eyes south, to thin—almost lipless mouths; filled with crooked stained teeth.

They chafed within the confines of their bodies and their tiny flimsy home built for gnomes.
They belched and farted continuously. Hapless bible bashers were assaulted by the great roiling miasma of stench that leapt from the dim interior. They left with impunity on the rotting front porch―daring theft; their shoes, listing like sinking wrecks, victims of feet calloused and varicose, with hammer toes and huge swollen bunions.

They had no sense of humour but laughed at the misfortunes of others. They stole and lied shamelessly and fought with each other savagely using anything that came to hand: lumps of timber, half a brick or fists the size of hams.

The only physical characteristics that differentiated the females from the males, was their shapeless, easy-care crimplene shifts, step-ins, and fondness for ugly china dogs. Each morning they grunted with the exertion of shoving their distended guts—grotesquely decorated with purple stretch marks an inch or more wide; into grimy pink elastic girdles that stretched from their midriff to just above their knobbly knees. Both mother and daughter procured on a monthly basis, tight curly permanents: the elder tinted purple, the younger, a muddy brown.

The broad humped shoulders of all were thickly peppered with dandruff, a disquieting fact when pondering the contents of my dinner plate. They were strict carnivores, all cuts of meat served bloody and blackened as though cooked with a blowtorch, underneath each singed crust lay an oozing interior. As garnishments in a strange blind date arrangement, lolled grey peas and even greyer potatoes, eyes largely intact, pocked with gobbets of boiled earth like the cook’s navel.

Annie, Maddie and I lived with them briefly while my mother and Russell searched for a home of their own. We were shoved like submariners into bunks occupying one side of the window-less dining room. Each night we clambered over the Formica dining table and each other to reach our narrow thin mattresses. In the scant half hour remaining before lights out, we perused the cluttered shelves of the sideboard, crowded with hundreds of dusty porcelain dogs.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Almost every working class home of a certain vintage and older has at least one sunroom. Not expressly built as such, rather, they are in my experience, ramshackle filled-in back or front verandas. Filled-in, with an assortment of rattling geriatric casements and fixed panes bereft of putty. I was lucky enough to call one my bedroom. I think it might have originally been an outside washhouse for both bodies and clothing, accessed via the kitchen and sharing a thin fibro wall with the bathroom.

Every morning I’d pick up the posters that had slid down the previous night. Sleeping in the room was like sleeping in a tent―freezing in winter, stifling in summer; the walls always slick with condensation. Each night I’d press down firmly on the sticky tape keeping the “TV Week” pullout poster— I’d surreptitiously snagged from our local GP’s waiting room of Captain James T Kirk; to the grimy white, full-gloss wall above my bed. I would stare until my eyes itched and threatened to water, burning into my memory banks every pancake-filled pore of his smiling face. My breaths: small white clouds as I chanted my mantra... Beam me up Scotty. Then, checking the darkness called the backyard, I‘d reverently kiss the poster’s lips, flick off the 40 watter and slip under the powder-blue acrylon blanket. Squeezing my eyes shut, I’d try to keep the afterimage of his face under my eyelids, fall immediately asleep, and theoretically dream about space... the final frontier.

In these dreams I would look terrific in knickerbockers and patent boots, my hair a shining Vidal Sassoon asymmetrical helmet. Meaningful glances would pass between the Captain and I, unnoticed by Sulu or Spock. I would smile and chew on the torn, satin blanket binding as James’s mellifluous voice intoned, ‘Captains log, star date... ‘

The floorboard under the lino and directly under the threshold to my room creaking, signalled the start of Russell’s night-time patrol. Holding my breath, I’d watch the doorknob turn ever so slowly.

‘Dull, are you awake?’ he’d whisper. ‘Dull?’

When Russell said darl’―short for darling; to either my Mum or us, it came out sounding like dull.

Mum would sarcastically reply after its every use, ‘Yes... that’s me, dull and boring.’

When Russell failed to get an answer from me, he’d giggle in a decidedly girlish manner and whisper into my ear, ‘No use pretending, I know you’re awake.’

Sometimes my silent prayers were answered and the nightly ritual foiled by the sound of a family member visiting the loo or getting a glass of water, but most nights—
I was the dirtiest girl on the planet.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

James was not my first love that honour goes to Shintaro. But—and I want to make this very clear; not the second Shintaro that many of you will remember, no, I didn’t fancy him a bit. Almost half a century later and I can still conjure Koichi Ose’s sombre oval face and immaculate ponytail. I also fantasized that Tombei the Mist, his sidekick and I were best friends, nimbly jumping sideways and backwards onto rooftops avoiding the star knives of ninjas. Then, in my early teens... came Captain Kirk, followed by the thin white duke, Bowie.

Lately, I will forgive Johnny Depp any bad acting choices like “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”, the only role in which I find him distinctly un-sexy. Also, whilst strictly speaking Brad Pitt is not my type, it’s hard to go past that scene in “Meet Joe Black” where he as Death, makes love for the first time. And, it was worth ploughing through “Troy” to see his naked buttocks.

I’m aware that I am confessing to a penchant for pretty boys, males who are unafraid to embrace their animas. But what, if anything, does that mean?

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

In an effort to save their hit and run marriage, my father accepts a job in the New Guinea Highlands.

On a cool autumn evening that promises a cruel winter, Annie and I—each clutching prized possessions; bid Katoomba’s Three Sisters, farewell. Annie hugs her celluloid baby doll tight, whilst I keep high and steady, the small cage covered with a tea towel that holds my best friend—a subdued and trembling canary. At the airport, he is wrested from me and handed solemnly to a distant relative. I am pushed into the aircraft howling at the injustice and told to grow up. Roughly translated it means: shut up and put up―resistance is futile.

My eyes are swollen red slits by the time we land to refuel in Brisbane. I am determined to run away at the first opportunity and find Tweety, but the unfamiliar darkness, chain-link fences and grotesque cane toads on the tarmac, dissolve my resolve. I tell myself it probably is for the best. Any other place and any other family would have to be an improvement in the quality of both our lives.

We land in Port Moresby at dawn, the runway already hot enough to fry eggs. Squiggly heat lines, like those in cartoons about the Sahara, cause everything to take on a drunken wooziness, including us. We gasp with fear when we see a black person for the first time. Our mother hisses and tells us to shut our mouths and avert our eyes, but I can’t take mine away.

We are led disorientated to a small un-pressurized plane, given orange-flavoured, hard candies and moist face cloths. We fly over high mountains cloaked in dense viridian jungle, unscathed by roads or towns, the drone of the plane’s twin engines’ piercing our throbbing eardrums.

We land intact on a short dirt track. A rusty khaki jeep held together by paint, arrives as if out of thin air. The pilot―now baggage handler; throws our bulging cardboard suitcase lashed tight with Dad’s only belt, onto our laps. Together we lurch into the waiting green solitude.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Suffocating under a blanket of tropical fug, Annie and I view the turbulent waters with surly-faced suspicion—remembering the scrambling crocs that swarm like maggots everywhere but here.

‘There’s no “puk puks” in this stretch,’ instructs my father, his bum wedged tightly in a large black tyre that is being grabbed and twisted roughly by the river’s mischievous hands.

Tea-coloured water nips at our ankles coyly—like a small dog...it longs to dominate.

Noting the flailing bodies of the adults rendered semi-conscious by grog and humidity, I assure myself and Annie that the crocs have bigger fish to fry.

We slip in and float like windblown fruit, buoyant in ruched swimmers—like ticks engorged with blood.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Negotiations for the pig take all morning. The teenage boar in question interrupts proceedings again and again, asserting himself like every adolescent male.

I kick a fossilized soccer ball between his short front legs, where it lodges beneath his pot belly. Piebald, sway backed, encrusted with filth; his arrogant glassy eyes―hard and unfathomable as my teddy’s, inspect my meagre frame; finding me inconsequential.
Trumpeting his superior masculinity, his sticky snout—bunched and pilled like an op shop sweater; reveals purple gums and amber teeth.

He arrives trussed.
My father’s knives set out meticulously beneath gallows—where headless chooks perform the dance of death.

His despairing eyes spy the surgeon’s spotted apron and bulge with prescience.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The village is like a ringworm scar on the hide of a hirsute beast.

Daddy long leg huts cluster as if afraid, the tamped earth rings hollowly with our steps.

Shy “meries” with prized piglets dangling greedily from elongated breasts; mimic our colonial superiority...waving back, before collapsing into nervous giggles.

Here—like everywhere else; my mother is an exotic creature. Clad in short shorts, gumboots and my father’s checked shirt, tied at her midriff, she wields the machete —that is mandatory; in this environment that grows quite literally, before our eyes.
As usual, Annie is complaining.

I know better.

This daily walk is one of the ways my mother escapes the open hostility of the Anglo Aussies back at the settlement. When safely out of earshot, she begins to sing. The jungle holds its breath and listens to her sad love songs; snatches of Opera and bum-jiggling Italian pop classics like "Volare".

Annie squeals in terror as the bridge―a cat’s cradle of vines and fallen branches; sways to her Latin rhythm. I follow closely, my eyes fixed on Mum’s pert behind.

The distended bellies of the village children rumble hello with the gas of malnutrition. Mum distributes her gifts of tinned fish, flour and sugar, shrugging off the pidgin thanks.

At night, feigning sleep, I listen to their hushed arguments.

My father’s accusations “that she is spoiling them”.

My mother’s―“that they are the only people worth befriending...the rest jumped-up white trash”.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Their marriage runs aground in Moresby.
As any sailor who has jumped ship here can attest―it is a hell hole.

Word of the broken contract reaches every employer and my father is reduced to taking on casual work at “black” rates.

Camped, in a one of a dozen greasy cells of a hostel for single men, my mother fends off at first, the lecherous remarks and covert innuendos.

My father disappears with the dawn each turgid day, reappearing listless, his cheeks salted with coarse whiskers, his odour rank, his papery lips brushing his daughters’ moist cheeks with sad goodnights.

One day, my mother stops bailing water, and sets a new course.

The smirking yobbo with the sandy hair is returning home to Australia on annual leave.
She dumps him in Brisbane without a backward glance.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I’d never seen that much food laid out in one go—and we were alive.

Ray’s shivers come in waves, the sort that plagues small dogs like Fox terriers and Jack Russells. Graveyards don't bother me―quite the opposite I feel relatively safe.

‘It’s not the dead ones you should be worried about, it’s the live buggers,’ I whisper in his ear.
It doesn’t help.

The mourners chant and wave incense sticks around for a good half hour while Ray trembles like a leaf and I salivate. We wait ten minutes and I am into it.

‘Mmmm,’ I say with a crammed mouth, ‘try this chicken, it’s delicious.’

Ray shakes his head and continues to stand guard, acting as though he is certain vampires―or some other version of the undead; will materialize at any moment and take revenge for our theft of the food left for them.

‘Come on, the dead don’t eat, silly. Look...there’s an entire plate of those weird cakes you like. Yerrchh―you can have them all.’

‘They’re called moon cakes, and I don’t want them―thanks.’

He is actually wringing his hands in a kind of “woe is me” way.

‘For God’s sake, can’t you hurry up? Eat faster.’

‘Hold yer horses. You know; I can’t figure it out,’ I say—stripping the flesh of the chicken wings as if peeling off a cardigan; ‘you go to confession every Friday, and Mass every Sunday.’

‘Yeah―so, what’s your point?’

‘My point is...card carrying Catholics aren’t supposed to be superstitious. For Christ sake, you’re even wearing your scapula medal. Nothing, I repeat nothing’s going to happen!’ I saunter over to the next gravestone. ‘Hey, there’s a king’s ransom in barbequed pork here...don’t be such wuss.’

‘It’s all very well for you.’

‘Whaddya mean “it’s all very well for me”. Oh―I get it, I’m the “gwai lo”... low life white devil. Cut the crap, you’re as much Australian as I am. You were born here too.’

‘Maybe so, but you at least look like the rest of them.’

I chew on a bit of gristle feeling bad, filled with a kind of collective guilt.

‘That’s crap and you know it,’ I say spitting out the cartilage. ‘I don’t fit in any better than you. They can smell their own.’

I grab his slender arm and rest my head on his shoulder.

‘I’ve lost my appetite, let’s get outta here’.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Ray’s parents live in a perpetual state of siege. They trust no one, not even ―it seemed; each other.

In the days before “enlightenment”, when Australia was reserved strictly for whites, and aboriginals were kept in reserves, Ruby and Wai San lived between the cracks of a not so straight path. They were “illegals” who, like the other unwelcome house guests―such as the European black rat; had crept in the back door when a blind eye was turned. Living in a state of fear made them paranoid, unreasonable, and eccentric bordering on psychotic.

They both wore second-hand khaki fatigues and rubber-soled, black canvas shoes, bought cheaply from army disposal stores. Every six months, Ruby had her thinning hair tortured into the tightest of perms―so it would be longer between visits to the hairdresser, while Wai San―in an even more cost-effective solution; hacked at his own, in a haphazard manner. Each hair on his scalp defied gravity, each three times the circumference of an average Caucasian strand, blue-black and bristling, fit to grace a boot brush. His avant guard coiffure reminiscent of Egon Schiele —after a home trim with the “whipper snipper”; his features and short frame likewise carved in a brutal manner. Inmate lean, his mahogany-coloured skin clung to every jutting angle as though shrink wrapped. Large, square, peg-like teeth jostled for space in a mouth that never smiled.

He never speaks directly to anyone, instead, uses his wife as the go-between. Ray explains that they communicate in a sort of “Pidgin” Cantonese, after which, Ruby translates to her sons and customers in a version of Pidgin English—she devised and she alone understands. The hapless listener, gleans what meaning they can, aided by her facial expressions ―which are limited to:
I don’t like you, I don’t trust you, you are stupid, go away now; the tone of her voice—shrill or shriller, and her wild gesticulations.

No one knows what language his father speaks. Ray had been told by Ruby, that Wai San hails from an obscure province in a northern part of mainland China. (Decades later, just how obscure becomes clear, as I watch a television documentary about North Korea. The same hatchet sharp features grace the countenances of those who risk everything, fleeing over the border between China and Korea).

Wai San met Ruby in a Canton sweatshop where he was gainfully employed by her swaggering, light-skinned father. She is taller than average―towering over Wai San’s famine induced stature; moonflower pale and slim as a reed.

The Ruby I try to avoid at all costs has a circular face that lays thickly over her insignificant features like a pancake. Her eyes behind their bakelite framed spectacles, are tiny slits through which glitter, black orbs―hard and calculating. The merest suggestion of a nose, tries valiantly to hold up those heavy frames, however the slightest movement sends them sliding south to the small mouth filled with an ill-fitting pair of dentures.

Ruby smiles all the time.

It is not a smile generated by warmth or, good humour, it is Ruby’s “face”, a mask designed to convey the correct message.

Two days after moving into the neighbourhood I met Ray. He was slumped apathetically behind the greasy, fly-specked countertop of his parents’ corner shop―a dish fit for a queen; his handsome face a triumphant blend of two unremarkable gene pools. The bell over the door tinkled desultorily as I wrestled with its sagging frame and torn flyscreen. He raised his eyes barely high enough to note my only pair of shoes―originally black, now grizzled grey with scuffs and down at the heels, his decision to travel no further; a rebuke. As I tell him later, it was not love at first sight.

It was a shoplifter’s paradise, if there had been anything worthwhile stealing that is.

Things: hundreds of things, thousands of things―all manner of things that I had not seen before; could name or guess their purpose, are stacked in precariously leaning towers of crates. The crates proclaim―in faded reds, blacks and indigoes; their mysterious contents in indecipherable calligraphy. I blow the dust off a rubber-banded set of dog-eared packets and catch the unmistakable scent of tea―not “Bushells”; but a foreign variety that I will acquire a taste for. Then I sneezed.

It is not a ladylike ‘choo, followed by a discreet sniff. It is a trumpeting atchoo, followed by a loud snort.

‘Can I help you?’ he inquires in a voice that struggles to disguise his disinterest.

‘No ―um, yes. Do you sell any Australian food?

‘Define Australian food’.

I realise I’ve committed the first of many faux par.

‘Baked beans...do you have any?’

His large ―and disturbingly sad, almond-shaped eyes linger on my face for longer than decorum dictates. He drops them and stares at a spot roughly halfway between us.

‘Ohhh ...Australian food’.

I redden at the sarcastic emphasis on Australian. He goes to the back of the shop and fetches a very unsafe looking stepladder, and proceeds to climb right to the top of a set of shelves constructed from ex-crate timbers.

In an effort to salvage some dignity, I remark―in as casual a tone as I can muster; ‘Guess you don’t sell much’.

‘Quite a bit actually,’ he says placing the tin in front of me, ‘—we have to keep them up high so they don’t get pinched.’

Touché, I thought as I paid in one and two cent coins.

On the footpath outside, I examine the bulging, dented tin with no label.
Eating its contents will be a leap of faith.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

‘So was it my witty remarks or my good looks that dazzled you?’

‘Neither. It was the dried snot on your cheek.’

I hug his pathetically thin frame to me, ‘Well... let’s not save that for the grandchildren’.

I feel him stiffen a fraction at the mention of grandchildren and draw back from me.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Course I’m not sure! Can’t afford to see a doctor. Don’t know anybody I can ask’.

‘Maybe you’re wrong?’

‘Maybe’.

‘You look the same,’ he says, ‘—all pink, white and blue.’

‘Yeah...with a soft yellow centre.’

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph―Mum’ll kill me.’

‘Nah she won’t... she’ll just post you back to China.’

‘We could get married?’

‘Slight problem―we’re under aged. Besides...I’m white trash―remember.’

‘What if we elope?’

‘Get real. Between the two of us we haven’t got the bus fare to get into the city. Love maybe blind, but it does need a meal every now and then. Let’s face it; I’m up the proverbial creek.’

‘There must be some way to solve the problem.’

‘Well...I’ve always been a problem child and―pardon the pun, insolvent.’

‘Stop kidding around Bubby―and don’t you dare say it.’

‘Give me a break. I’ve lost my dignity, my sanity and―when Ruby finds out, the father of my unborn child. So fer Chris’sake, let a kid with a kid ―kid.’

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I’ll forgive him ―I’ll forgive him everything, if he just comes.

Another wave of pain breaks, washes over me.

‘I’m just going to shave you dear,’ says a nurse, placing a small bowl of water on the bedside table, ‘―you know ...down below.’

‘Why?’

She looks up with a stymied expression, gives an almost imperceptible shrug, ‘It makes it easier for them...the doctors...’

I nod assent, and pull up the faded floral hospital shift. Her hands are cold, and I flinch.

‘Hold still, I won’t be long.’

Where is he? I’m very afraid he might not come. A couple of hours ago, I’d begged Mum to ring ―thrusting the paper with his phone number into her hand, ‘Please Mum, it’s his child too. Just ring and say...it won’t be long, and—that I want him to be here.’

‘He won’t come,’ says Mum in a flat tone.

‘Now I want you to lay on your side facing the wall―that’s it pet,’ instructs the nurse who has shaved my “burley”. ‘Pull up your legs towards your tummy―that’s it...now relax.’

I instinctively clench as something cold enters by anus.

‘I said relax!’ says the nurse in a less gentle voice.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Everyone has to have an enema,’ says the nurse, ‘―it cleans you out. Don’t want any accidents when push comes to shove.’

‘I need to go to the toilet,’ I say weakly.

‘I’ll take you there in a minute.’ She is ticking things off on my chart. As she reads she glances at me. ‘You’re seventeen, is that correct?’

I nod.

‘Is the father about?’

I shake my head.

Supporting one elbow, she takes me to a bathroom. ‘There’s the toilet… there’s the shower. Wash yourself afterwards’.

Waves of nausea, contractions and colicky pain wrack my body.
I am alone ―bathed in a harsh blue light.
I vomit over myself, unable to get off the toilet.
Hot shit gushes out of me.
I am a human geyser.
Every orifice is clamouring to be next.
Time ceases to have meaning in this private hell.
I am a symphony of pain:
regurgitate,
evacuate,
contract.
Some
time
later...
the door opens.
I am lying curled in a foetal position under the shower.
Its scalding water has coloured me bright boiled red.
I am empty―almost.

‘Silly girl!’ says the nurse, pointing to the red button next to the door ‘that’s, what that’s for.’

She snaps off the shower and hauls me to my feet. ‘You got yourself into this!’ she adds in a caustic voice.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The labour ward has seven beds with only curtains for privacy. Only one bed is occupied.
The Tongan girl next to me, ‘has been here a long, long time,’ whispers the nurse before leaving.
It is so quiet; I can hear the clock ticking and my racing heart, beating. Then I hear the first of many whimpers.

Her hair is heaped about her head like an inflated knitted turban. She wears―like me; a thin hospital shift that opens down the back. It is ridiculously short on her, barely covering her pudenda. She looks, however, anything but ridiculous. Fat glistening tears accompany her contractions.

I am very, very, afraid.

No one comes to check on us.
We are in purgatory.
Every now and then―I can’t help myself. I scream.

Afterwards―in the maternity ward; I am placed in the bed alongside her. I have dubbed her my black Madonna.

We, are kept separate―away from the other smiling mothers; at the far end of the ward.
They are married―surrounded by husbands and other offspring; glowing with pride at a job well down.
We are unmarried, lacklustre, alone, and ashamed.

Her baby girl―born eight hours before my son, is brought to her, and placed at her breast.
My greedy boy is soon latching at mine. My black Madonna smiles at me in complicity, indicating with her eyes; the other mothers watching us, they clutch bottles in their hands―their breasts will not be ruined, their children will inflate faster than ours.
We are poor; we cannot afford formula―even if we wanted to bottle feed.

Later in the day, in companionable silence, I admire her colossal form.
She has brushed out her hair.
The ward is a hushed audience.
Black, tightly frizzed, it is―let out; taller than me.
She works at it with a long toothed wooden comb. Satisfied, she wrestles it into a braid. It is like a python. She coils it about her head and affixes it―until tomorrow, with sturdy pins.

The silence is replaced by the cries of babies, the rattles of trolleys and the squeak of rubber soled nurses’ shoes.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

‘Now I know what dead weight means,’ says my husband.

We gaze at the alabaster statue of our middle son.
We totter toward his bed as though our blood is coagulating.
We are turning into effigies of ourselves.

‘We’re waiting for the chopper to set down; his injuries are too grave to be treated here. You’re the boy’s parents?’ asks the attending doctor.

They have cut his school clothes off.
A loud humming fills my ears.
The only sounds that penetrate are those made by his life-support―it is the most lifelike object in the room.
We watch his chest rise and fall rhythmically, hypnotized by the unspoken, paralysed with dread.

‘How is our other son?’ my husband croaks.

‘He’s fine, a few bruises … he’s in shock,’ replies the fresh faced doctor indicating with the slightest pointing of his jaw, the trembling, helpless form seated on the bed nearby.

I see his white face, but am unable to mouth any words of maternal comfort; I’ve lost the ability to speak, to think, to breath.

‘Can we speak to him?’ says my husband. ‘Can he hear us?’

‘I don’t think he can. You understand, don’t you…he’s in what we call a vegetative state―a coma. He’s received a “severe closed head injury” says the doctor in a gentle tone, ‘—but it can’t hurt.’

I hear someone sob and realize my face is wet.
It is my other self, sobbing.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

In the landscape of my mind, there is a black ocean.
Tears of frustration, anger, grief and hatred fill it.

I wander the desolate shoreline, devoid of life, scoured by willy willies of despair.
I stand for the space of two heartbeats or perhaps two lifetimes or two millennia,
scrying its inky depths, the surface smooth hard polished looking.
There are no currents; nothing disturbs its unknowable fathoms.

My heart shrivels and becomes a salted plum.

I corral the emotions that brawl amongst themselves and,
as pitiless as a stoker in Belsen, sentence them to an indefinite term of solitary confinement.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

In my dreams, I am an assassin.

I make and hurl Molotov cocktails and watch him burn.

I slither neath his car, cut the fuel lines and smile as he canyons off the bends and becomes one with the mangled wreck.

I creep in the small hours of the morning when I know death most often comes calling to the sick and frail, through his window with chloroform.

I cut him slowly, to pieces, while he, paralysed, begs for death with eyes as big as golf balls.

I bay at the moon.

I howl for his blood.

I join a coven.

I make a pact with the devil.

And then, I wake.

I have been unconscious for a nanosecond, as I do not allow myself to sleep.

I return to watching the monitor wedded to this middle child.

I watch anxiously, the steep peaks and ragged troughs, that mark his tarzaning blood pressure and oxygen levels.

I apply on the hour, every hour in a seamless passage of time; eye drops to his staring eyes.

I massage his atrophying muscles.

I never once, pray to a god.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

‘I’m sitting in the middle―you wanna know why?’

My husband looks in the rear view mirror at him. I twist in my seat to half face him and answer, ‘Okay—why?’

‘So that if we crash―I’ll go through the windscreen and die.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I snap at him.

‘Why do you say things like that?’ says my husband, gripping the steering wheel a little tighter.

‘If I sit at the side, then my head will bang something―and I’ll be even more retardisized...’

‘You’re not retarded,’ I offer softly.

‘Well…I’m different, now. When they told you―at the hospital, why didn’t you kill me?’

We travel in a pod of silence, shocked by his remark.

‘We couldn’t,’ says my husband, ‘—we wouldn’t ever do that. We love you.’

‘If I have another accident…I’d rather die―that’s why I’m staying in the middle.’

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

On the thin ribbon of grass outside my window, I watch the magpie mother and her grey baby.
He shuffles awkwardly by her side, begging.
He doesn’t beg in a dignified ascetic way, rather, he is abusive; like a homeless alcoholic asking―no, demanding: money or fags.

The mother seems oblivious to these flaws.
She is patient, quiet and forgiving, ever alert to both danger and protein, spying earthworms, slugs, beetles, centipedes and spiders, topping up her ever hungry child.
It is as if he has sustained damage to his frontal lobe and is tricked into always feeling ravenous.

In the personal items isle of the supermarket, I see another patient mother and her grey son.
He looks at least 18 or 19, yet he clutches the front of his jeans and mewls, ‘Wanna go wee wee.’

The mother’s eyes flick across to mine, she flushes and in a low voice says quickly to me,
a total stranger yet somehow complicit, ‘He was in an accident,’ then hurries to the boy’s side, ‘C’mon love…time to go home.’
He looks at her blankly, his face creased with anxiety and shambles obediently after her.

There is a large ugly scar dissecting his forehead.

There are lots of magpie mothers, more than I ever guessed.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Mum saw her maternal grandmother once.

Lucia is too far gone to recognize Elena or her daughter. She lies serenely on her paliasse, a great shock of iron-grey hair stretching a yard in all directions.

When Elena kisses Lucia’s desiccated cheek, she whispers, ‘Ciao Mama, sono Io, Elena.’

Lucia’s long lidded, deep set eyes swivell and settle on hers, her dreamy gaze coalescing like
a sudden change in the weather, focus and consider; first Elena and then my mother.

‘You are not Elena,’ she says in a dismissive tone, ‘my daughter is young…and beautiful. You are an ugly old hag.’

Elena weeps silently as she brushes the tangled locks and strokes the smooth brow of her lunatic mother.

Mum looks at the small grilled opening high in the stonewall, studies the patina of vomit and excrement stains and even, the contents of the latrine bucket, rather than once meet her mother’s eyes and somehow be in collusion with this ultimate disgrace.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

With my first computer came my first scanner.
Of the many tasks I set myself is that of posterity.

Perhaps I sensed my impending amputation from the body of the family.

Long dead—if not already—soon to be forgotten faces of grandparents and sundry ancestors stare from my digital desktop, name begging.

The important―immediate members are deciphered and given scanty histories.
A family tree, autumnal at best, begins to take shape.
It is I note, unbalanced.
There is a limb missing.

There are no photographs, no letters, no mention of my mother’s grandmother.
I have heard many stories about my mother’s grandfather.
His temper legendary: Zio Bartolomeo still bears the scars―his hand pinned to the dining room table by his Nonno’s fork for the cardinal sin of slouching.
His appetite for sex, prodigious—with anyone and anything.

The photos of Nonno’s wife, show long suffering eyes, a heavy chin and resignation to her husband’s proclivities and, her inability to provide a living heir.

My mother’s grandmother was both a relative, and a servant, in their upper class home. A “Contadina”, a country cousin who―dazzled by the impeccably groomed walrus moustache and whispered promises, fell to his charms and, fell pregnant.

In 1911, in Italy, illegitimacy was a societal crime of proportions I cannot imagine.
Elena is condemned to carry papers identifying her as such, stamped in large capitals.
It will charter the course of her life, her children’s, and their children.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A compulsion to fill empty spaces accompanied by a rapidly rising pulse,
constriction of the larynx and light headedness, are some of the symptoms of a chronic, sometimes acute condition that I have suffered from since early childhood—
commonly known as verbal diarrhoea.

Perhaps this underrated, and seldom recognized form of high anxiety,
explains the prevalence of court jesters, street corner prophets, TV messiahs
and somewhat pathetic comedians like Jim Carey and the beloved Danny Kaye,
in some of History’s darkest days.
Never the less, this—more than any physical illness; has plagued me,
falsely shaping the less-than-astute observer’s opinion.

Like a forked rudder it has steered me in directions I would never have ventured.

I have been labelled:
Foolish.
Empty-headed.
Optimistic.
And... ever-craving company.

Of those assumptions: only foolish is correct.

I am endlessly pessimistic.
Filled with foreboding.
Dystopic.
Agnostic.
Angry.
Vengeful.
And... self-absorbed.

I prefer my own company and the silence of empty spaces.
My fantasies are deserted islands, high isolated mountain eyries and wind-scoured cliff tops overlooking pounding seas.

I gobble any novels whose topic is post-holocaust: fantasy worlds, where the past is scrubbed, wiped of the visual pollution and memory noise that play ceaselessly before my inner eyes and in my inner ears.

A is for Albania

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