Sea Eagle Dreaming

Non-Fiction
Location – Milingimbi, Australia
Written – June 2009
[This piece was published in 'Overland' Magazine, Issue 197 in November 2009. It was the first piece I had published in a magazine. I tried to keep the writing as simple as possible, almost like a children's story. I did this in an attempt to capture the feel of the place. To read it again makes me nostalgic for Milingimbi...]

The city went bad, so we moved to Arnhem Land.

●

Our house is on stilts. I climbed the stairs of our new home, and put my hand on something that moved. I looked down to see a green tree frog hopping off the hand rail.

●

I sat by the window with a map of the island. I like maps. Especially maps without much on them. Sparse contours, broken lines of dots.

Amy thinks it’s odd that I can spend an hour poring over patchy folds of colour. But my eyes don’t just see the brown and green and blue. They see possibilities. The spaces are alive.

●

In the afternoon the rain comes.

●

Amy cut her foot in the ocean. She stepped on an oyster bed. The wound became infected, and made it painful for her to walk. I told her to put on her shoes, to keep the wound clean. She wore thongs. The wound swelled up red, with a tiny white blister. I told her to go to the clinic. She said she’d bathe it in the sea-water instead. We walked back to the ocean. She dipped her foot in the water and screamed. I rushed to look at her foot. A thread of blood washed away. The blister had burst, and a lone maggot crawled out.

●

The kids were fascinated by Amy’s sunscreen. She explained what it’s for.

“Black skin not get burnt,” one girl replied thoughtfully. “Because it’s healthier. What your homeland?”

“Melbourne.”

“Yaka, your homeland. Milingimbi? Maningrida? Elcho? ....Darwin?”

Most of the kids have never been to Darwin. Some have never left the island.

“I don’t know. We live here now...”

“What your skin name?”

“Gutjan.” Amy says.

“I don’t know mine,” I said. “I haven’t been adopted.”

●

The orphan of Milingimbi.

●

The community is called Milingimbi. The island is called Yurrwi.

When the tide is highest, two-thirds of the island is submerged, and isn’t called anything.

●

We share our house with frogs that appear after rain. With spiders that live on the balcony, one with a furry egg-sack suspended in web. With geckos, I leave the outside light on and it attracts their dinner. With the snakes in our backyard, chasing frogs in the dark. With the giant cockroaches that scuttle across the kitchen floor at night, and take flight when you try to catch them. With ants alert to any spilt crumb or drop of cordial, you get used to them crawling over your legs while you sleep. With the birds that live in our backyard jungle, and with the dragonflies that herald the outback spring.

●

After a month we watched television for the first time. We were minding the house of a friend. He has a satellite dish. We flicked the TV on and saw Japanese businessmen. They were throwing beans off a balcony, praying for the economy to improve. I turned the TV off.

●

We walked out onto the mud flats as the sun set. The mud is baked hard. We spread our arms to the breeze as the air cooled. Amy laid flat on her back, with a sigh.

“Lay down,” she said. “The earth is still warm.”

We laid there looking at the sky. Crows hovered overhead. They made slow passes with a pffft pffft pffft of their wings, their heads darting about with quick eyes. Watching us. I sat up. Twenty crows were milling about, pacing the mud flats. I stood and they took flight, retreating to the mangroves.

“Hey Amy. Lay still a moment. I wanna test something.”

We laid back and waited. The crows returned. Making their watchful passes with the pffft pffft pffft of their wings, only metres overhead. They gathered around us again.

“They’re waiting for us to die,” I said. “They want our eyes.”

●

The rain stopped and the fresh air carried its scent. Black cockatoos screeched overhead. We passed a grove of pandanus, palm trees bulging with coconuts. Blue-winged kookaburras are flashes of colour in the canopy. The sound of insects was all around us.

“This place makes sense,” I said.

●

Simplicity.

●

The church is a relic. The windows are broken, the door swings open, and there’s dust on the uneven rocky floor. The Milingimbi community was started by Methodist missionaries, in the 1920’s. But they’re not here anymore. The only visible remnants are the broken church and the colourful missionary dresses worn by the women.

A Yolngu boy ran up to us.

“Give me lollie and I tell you I love Jee-bus,” he said.

●

There’s a sign in the only shop on the island, that reads:

“Children Must Wear Clothes In The ALPA! No Children Without Clothes Will Be Served In This Store!”

●

Amy had to prepare her class for a standardised test. Every student in the Northern Territory had to sit for it. Her class wasn’t ready. She sat with one boy and tried to explain the hieroglyphics of text. It was the story of a kid who got chocolate cake on his shirt. The chocolate stain ruined his day. Amy thought the boy understood every word of the story. The boy waited patiently, and after some time Amy asked a question to see if he followed. There was a long pause.

“Miss,” he said, in his small voice. “I want to go hunting... Crab. Fish...”

●

We started with mussels. The women gather them at low tide, on the rocks off Top Camp. You throw them in the fire. When the shells pop open they’re ready. The ALPA shop was closed for a long weekend, and it gave us a good excuse to go hunting. The mussels are hard to find. Most of the shells are empty. Some looked intact, but with a tap we found them full of sloppy mud, and seawater.

Kids were fishing with hand-reels. They asked what we were looking for, I showed them the empty mussel shells. A boy resolved to help us. As I picked about in the sand, occasionally coming up with one, he’d return to present me with double-handfulls of them. Silently. The boy was about five years old. After some time, he showed me how. You overturn the rocks, and pick about in the sand underneath with a knife, or spoon. He handed me a knife and I started to find them.

●

You make spears from the branches of a certain tree. I don’t know its name. Johnny showed me the one. It grows in the sand by the mangroves. He took the axe and disappeared into the leaves. When he found the right branch he chopped it at the base, and passed it to me. It must have been five metres long. We went back to the fire and he laid the branch in the coals. Turning it so it wouldn’t burn. When he’d heated the length of the stick he peeled the bark back, to the smooth wood underneath.

●

There are cycads in the bush. Plants that have been around since the time of the dinosaurs. The Yolngu take the nuts from the plant and use it to make a sort of bread. The cycad bread keeps for a long time. They used to wrap it, and take it with them on overland journeys. But the nuts must be prepared properly. They’re poisonous, and if you don’t prepare them properly then you die.

●

In the night there are stars.

●

I always avoided the water. Then I learnt to fish with nets.

Paul attached a wooden pole to both ends of the long net. Five of us took up a length of it into our hands. Paul ventured out first, into the water and mangroves. There was a channel in the water, and I slipped into the brown. Up to my waist. We held the net up above our heads so it wouldn’t get snagged on the submerged logs. The water is an unknown language. As I was up to my chest, standing there in the water, one of the Yolgnu men saw his kids splashing at the water’s edge, and waved them away.

“Yaka! Bäru. Bäru.” He said.

I understand that much.

“No! Crocodiles. Crocodiles.”

●

The days are hot. Tamarind trees lend us their shade.

The Macassans brought them here. Yolngu used to trade with the Macassans, who came from what is now called Indonesia. The Macassans would live in Arnhem Land for several months of the year.

The Yolngu had a intricate system of trade with the Macassans, and with tribes as far away as Central Australia. Shortly after Federation, in 1901, the government introduced steep licensing fees for the Macassans, who’d gathered the trepang sea-cucumber from the shores of Arnhem Land for hundreds of years. In 1906 they were prohibited from entering Australian waters at all. The Macassans stopped coming. The Yolngu trade networks were destroyed.

Most people would say the Macassans brought the tamarind trees here for the tamarind fruit. But maybe it was also for the shade. The shade remains.

●

The trick to making a spear is in getting it straight. Paul saw the bend in my spear and showed me what to do. You put the bend in the hot coals. Turning, turning so it won’t burn. When the wood was soft he put the spear in the fork of a tree, and leaned on it. Pushing on the bend. The trick, he said, is to push hard enough so that the bend straightens. If you push too hard the gara will break.

At work, Paul told me he went fishing on his lunch break. He keeps his spears out the back of the storeroom. He showed me. Elegant, perfect. My gara is still bent. When the spear is finished, you can hunt turtle, and stingray.

●

The kids splash about in the Arafura Sea. They called to us. One boy rushed over, holding something in his hand. It’s a baby turtle. He handed it to me. It fitted on my palm. It’s beautiful, with shades of blue and gray. I thought it was alive. There’s more than one, the kids seem to be collecting them. A dog grabbed one of the baby turtles in its mouth and the kids yelled at it, “Sha! Sha!” Brandishing sticks like spears. Amy managed to retrieve it. By then we could see that the turtles were all dead.

We saw Pete, further up the beach. He was trying to fix the engine of his boat. Last night, some of his adopted Yolngu family tied up his boat too close to the waterline. When the tide came in his boat sank, wrecking the engine. The boat was filled with hundreds of turtle eggs they’d gathered that afternoon. The sea brought in the tide of broken shells and dead baby turtles.

●

Pete is balanda, like us. A whitefella. Him and his wife got divorced, a long time ago. So he started walking. He walked for four years, and he ended up here.

The other day he said he’d just been shipwrecked on Mooroongga Island. Him and nine members of his Yolngu family were fishing in a boat when the engine died.

“That must have been scary,” I said.

“Nah. Best time of my life, mate. We slept on the sand. Ate fish. Crab. Turtle eggs. After five days someone rang for a charter plane to bring us back.”

●

The bush south of Bottom Camp is out of bounds to balanda. We don’t go there.

●

Otis looks like a wise man. He’s fifty, with a full white beard, black face, and a tubby belly. He giggles easily. Every time I see him he has his tiny grandson on his shoulders. He calls his grandson “my father.”

His father jumps off his shoulders and totters about. When he wanders too far Otis pitches a little shell or two at him and calls him back. Otis’s father is two years old, his name is Jim. He’s only recently been called by his Yolngu name again, as someone with that name died. Otis said Jim loves to dance to the yidaki, the didgeridoo. He picked up a piece of PVC pipe washed up on the shore, and played it like the yidaki. But Jim was shy to dance in front of us. He climbed back onto Otis’s shoulders.

●

There’s wreckage in the undergrowth near the airfield. The tangled remains of aeroplanes. They might be Australian Spitfires, or Japanese Zekes.

Milingimbi was bombed by the Japanese during World War II. There were dogfights above the island. The R.A.A.F made the airfield during the war, it was used to refuel planes.

A Yolgnu woman tells me that up the north of the island you can still find fortifications and fuel dumps left over by the air force. I went looking for them. I found nothing. The woolybutt, the pandanus, the cycads, and the stringybark forests gave me no clues. The kookaburras laughed at me. I went home.

●

Milingimbi is a dry community. I got thirsty, so I flew to Darwin for a beer.

I entered the Frogshollow backpackers to foreign grins. A world of people laid back in deck chairs, swilling bourbon, a group of Germans crouched by the pool smoking a joint. Swedes and Southern European women swanning about the pool in bikinis and tanned skin.

I rushed around the CBD, trying to get things done.

As I walked back to the hostel, drunk, I saw a pair of Yolngu women I recognised. They called out hello. Their serene, sober eyes reminded me.

“Tom. What you doing?”

“Walking. You?”

“Visiting family.”

“When are you going home?”

“Thursday.”

●

‘My Island Home,’ by the Warumpi Band, wasn’t written as an ode to Australia. The song pines for Elcho Island, in Arnhem Land.

●

On the morning of Easter Sunday we got up before dawn. There were three crosses facing the Arafura Sea. A group of older Yolngu stood facing the rising sun. One bloke gently strummed a battered acoustic as they sang hymns in English:

“He rose again/ he rose again.”

●

The sun sets over the bush. The sun rises over the Arafura sea.

●

A mob from Elcho came for Easter. They had a huge turtle. Miyapunu. The men cut it up on the sand. They had long knives. With the bottom half of the shell removed, they carved the flesh into large chunks, that were placed to one side. Each part was set into a different pile, and some into tins. Nothing wasted. They were getting ready to cook it up. I spoke with an older bloke. He handed me a bit of raw turtle meat to taste.

After cutting up the turtle the women place the chunks of meat onto hot coals, and atop the meat add a layer of a particular type of branch. The bloke said the leaves make the meat taste good. Then they put the empty top half of the shell over that, and cover the lot with a layer of sand. When the oven was complete they started to wander away, while it cooked.

I asked the bloke, “how long do you cook it for?”

“Oh, one hour, one-half hours. Half-hour. Two hours - something like that.”

●

Twenty people eat in the sand.

●

I walk home on my lunch break. There’s a shortcut, a 4WD track across the patch of grassland between the ALPA shop and our place. It’s a narrow track, almost obscured by the long grass that rises to waist-height on either side. I keep a watchful eye out for snakes. As I walk, with the sound of chirping insects almost deafening, I sweat in the air. The air is warm and moist, like breath. I can feel it coming from the green. The air of the grass, and the trees, breathing.

●

Everything has its place, to the Yolngu. Every person, every animal, every fish, every plant, every object. Everything that it in this world, and everything that is not. That’s why balanda are adopted into Yolngu families. Then your place is known, and understood.

●

While fishing we saw a sea eagle. It’d spotted the fish we’d sat on the mud of the mangroves. The eagle circled, and then left with a broad stroke of its wings.

●

We threw a few fish in the coals. After eating the mullet, Jack asked our skin names. Amy said she’s Gutjan, a subgroup of the Yirritja.

“I haven’t been adopted,” I said.

“You are Dhuwa,” Jack said. “Your wife Yirritja, you must be Dhuwa.” He asked Amy who adopted her. Jack thought about it, then said to me, “your skin name Wämut.”

My heart beat warmth through my body. As it always does. But you only notice it sometimes.

“Wämut,” he repeated. “Your totem is sea eagle. Damala. Your dreaming is sea eagle. Jabiru. Barramundi. You cannot harm these things, you must protect them. Every skin name protects their dreaming. This way everything is protected.”

I’m not an orphan. I never was.

Sea eagle dreaming.

●

We sleep with just a sheet to cover us. The Wet is almost over, and in the last week I’ve felt a tiny chill. It’s only a drop of a degree or two. But the weather is steady from one day to the next. When it’s the same temperature every night you notice that one or two degrees.

In the morning, I can tell the time by the temperature. You don’t need a clock. The heat climbs evenly, and the feel of it on your bare skin will tell you if you’ve slept in.

●

I don’t like the word ‘Paradise.’ Paradise is just in your head.

●

In the morning, Poppy the dog waits for me on the porch.

Whispers In Words That Make No Sense

Non-Fiction
Location – Adelaide, Australia
Written – May 2009
[This wasn’t an easy piece to write. I discovered a trick of writing to music - playing particular music on the stereo that fitted the mood and then riffing off of it like a guitar player. It remains unpublished though I personally think it’s one of the better things I’ve written about my mother’s dementia. It isn’t a happy story.]

I was blind to my mother for many months. I was away in India. Thoughts of her would come to me in darkness and in dreams but I haven’t seen her since Christmas. In my mind’s eye I saw her content in the Parklyn Aged Care Facility. I saw her as I remembered her. But the plot always thickens. You’re not swallowing enough of what goes on around you if it gets any thinner.

The last time I rang my mother she didn’t speak a word into the telephone.

“I’ve been in India, Ma. I haven’t seen you in a long time. I’ll come over and see you...”

She didn’t say a word. I could only hear her sobbing.

Then I start getting the calls from the doctors and the nurses. They tell me that I’ll need to make a decision. They say I’ll need to decide whether I want Mum to continue getting the tests and medical procedures, or whether I want her to be ‘comfortable.’ The head nurse of Parklyn tells me about the need to draw up a plan for Palliative Care. I’ve never heard those words before but I get the idea. My mother is dying.

I drink a bottle of scotch and then I sit down to think it through.

_____________________________________________________________________

I catch the bus to Adelaide. I don’t know what I expect to find - a zombie, perhaps, or a shiny surgical tool to incise my deepest misery. I’m afraid to see.

When I walk into the Parklyn ward I don’t just see the bent back and the skinny arms. I see the light and the presence of my Mother. I rush towards her. She’s sitting in a chair with her head down. I throw my arms around her and put my head on her shoulder. She smells old like a book. I can feel the upheavals of her breath. She wears an Indian dress and runs the fabric through her fingers. Her hair, like her skin, is gray. My mother is fifty-eight years old.

“Do you remember me Brenda?” Says my Aunt. “Bren? It’s your sister, Gail. Do you remember Gail?”

Mum doesn’t look up. She whispers something. Garbled. Her back is hunched forward so she doesn’t meet our eyes. The doctors call it ‘severe spinal degeneration.’ As the Alzheimer’s takes her mind so it takes her body. After some time she raises her head. Slowly. For just an instant our eyes meet and dazzle with recognition, or love.

“Where did you come from?” She asks clearly.

“I came from you Ma.”

We walk together. As I hold her hand I can see her pulse beating through her skin. She walks hunched over. She can’t see where she’s going. I guide her away from the walls and the closed doors. She walks as if inspecting the ground just in front of her feet. Leaning in close. Looking for something she’s never going to find.

She walks and then rests. She doesn’t see the nearby chairs. If you don’t guide her into one of the chairs then she crouches on her heels. I crouch with her, like her, inspecting the same things as her - the hem of her Indian dress, embroidered with a golden fabric that glints in the sun. We explore this tiniest of miracles together. When she’s ready to stand I ease her into a chair. There’s always a chair nearby in Parklyn.

I need to rest myself. I haven’t eaten or slept since last night. I give a nod to the pair of Punjabi blokes who work the afternoon shift and they take Mum by an arm each to lead her away. If you don’t do this she’ll never leave your side.

“I’ll see you tomorrow Mum.”

I clasp my hands in the prayer-sign before I go, in a wordless prayer to no-one and to no-thing. I’ve never done that before. Going to Parklyn isn’t the hard part, I remember now. It’s leaving that’s hard.

_____________________________________________________________________

Gail and I go back to her place and talk, using beer bottles as microphones. She’s still trying to get off the booze. I tell her I don’t want to be a bad influence, but tonight she’s having what a woman of clarity would call a moment of alcoholism. The nurses have told us that Mum still has life in her and we’ve seen it with our own eyes. She isn’t dying in a medical sense. She’s still on her feet. Part of us is relieved. But as the night grows long the guilt starts soaking into Gail’s voice. She used to care for Brenda before having a breakdown.

“I could have done more,” she says. “I should still be caring for her.”

“Don’t feel guilty Gail.. Mike and I tried too.”

It took my brother and I a long time I to realize that no matter what we do for our mother we can’t save her. There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza. A hole. And no matter what we do to fix it there’s still a hole.

“I tried to warn you and Mike. I knew what would happen.”

“We needed to Gail. We needed to understand.”

We thicken the plot with breath and cigarette smoke. She brushes the contours of her guilt onto the table with fingers tracing the ashes.

“But you don’t understand,” she says. “My mother never wanted a third child. When I was born my mother couldn’t hug me. She left. Took off to Sydney for a few years. Left raising me to Brenda, who was eight. She changed my nappies, bathed me, sang me to sleep. Brenda was like a mother to me, and I always looked up to her like a mother. She took care of me when I was helpless. So when she developed Alzheimer’s, I felt a duty to repay her. To look after her as she looked after me. But I failed.”

I don’t know how to reply. I take a swill of beer.

“I failed.”

“Barbara cared for Mike and I in a similar way,” I say. Our mother was lost then in the caverns of schizophrenia. “I guess both our mothers weren’t always around.”

“It was hard on you kids. You needed your real mother. One time I rang up your stepmother, Barbara, angry that she bought you a copy of a Stephen King novel. It was inappropriate for a kid.”

“Barbara did buy me that. Skeleton Crew. But it wasn’t the first Stephen King novel I’d read. You wanna know who bought me the first?” I take a drag on my cigarette. “Mum. I convinced her to buy Firestarter for me in a Melbourne book shop when I was eleven. She didn’t realize what it was. But I’d been reading Edgar Allen Poe before that. That kind of writing just made sense to me. You should have thanked Barbara when you called her, for helping to spark my love of reading and writing.” I stub out my smoke. “Sometimes the best way to help someone seems odd to other people I guess.”

Gail coughs. I’m changing the subject. I’m cursed with the blindness of day as Gail is cursed with the blindness of night.

“I’m a failure,” she repeats. “A failure. Your mother was educated and travelled the world. But look at me here. I can’t look after your mother. I can’t even look after myself.”

“Fuck, Gail,” I say, “you’re one of the few people I can talk to about this stuff, you’re one of the few people who understands. We don’t have much family left.”

But I’m drunk, there’s nothing I can say, and perhaps there is no antidote for guilt anyway.

_____________________________________________________________________


Gail wakes me.

“Tom! Get ready. Sam’ll be here in ten minutes.”

“What? Sam?”

Sam was my mother’s first husband. Mum used to talk about him a lot but I’ve never met him. I still getting dressed when he knocks on the door. He’s out of place in Gail’s broken home - a portly, middle-aged, successful man. A lecturer of Philosophy. The dogs bark at him. Gail takes a mug from the sink of dirty dishes and washes it to pour him a coffee.

He says that he’s in Adelaide for the weekend. He flew from Sydney for a high-school reunion. Yesterday he went around to 3 Godson street, the old family home, and found strangers living there. He couldn’t find Brenda in the phonebook. After some effort he tracked down Gail’s number. He speaks quietly as he slips down the tunnel of guilt.

“It was my fault the marriage ended. I cheated on Brenda.”

He speaks with his head down - presenting himself for our judgment. The room falls silent. He hasn’t seen Brenda in thirty years.

“Mum never expressed anything but fondness for you. There was no bitterness. And, on a selfish level, if you and Mum and stayed together then I wouldn’t exist.”

“I’d like to see Brenda.”

“It’ll be distressing for you to see her. It might be easier for you to remember her as she was.”

“I’d like to see her anyway.”

Perhaps he needs to go for his own reasons. So we go.

_____________________________________________________________________


We take his rental car.

I suggest that he resists the urge to play the ‘Do You Remember Me?’ game. It distresses Mum to put pressure on her, to fire questions at her that she can’t answer. Sometimes I have dreams where I find Mum in the wilderness - standing in a river, or crouched in a cave - and I embrace her, and as I embrace her I’m crying and I’m asking, “you remember me Mum, do you remember me...?” So I know the impulse to ask. But I don’t. Mum is a sunset that will not be the same tomorrow. And to clutch at an image of how the sunset was, or how it might be, is to lose your clear sight of what is happening right now.

We find Mum being spoon-fed her lunch. I rush towards her and rest my head against hers. Sam sits opposite her at the table.

“It’s Sam, Brenda. Sam? Do you remember Sam? We were... married. We lived in Glebe. Glebe? Do you remember Gracus and Claude? The cats??”

Mum says nothing. She’s inspecting the hem of her dress again, cradling the fabric in her fingers. Her hand moves to hold mine. The slightest movement, so small that the others don’t notice, and I don’t draw attention to it. Sam turns to Gail and begins asking questions about Brenda’s Condition.

“Is she always like this?”

I break from my hug with Ma.

“I’ll give you a moment alone with Mum. Hugs are better than conversation,” I say, and go outside to smoke a cigarette.

When I return Gail and Sam are in Mum’s room talking. I walk with Mum hand-in-hand doing laps around the ward. We stop to look at things - red flowers, Holly the cat, pictures on the wall. An old man knocks on one of the pictures. “Is anybody in there?” He says. “Is anybody home?”

Sam has to go. He needs to return the rental car and catch his flight to Sydney. He looks stunned. He hasn’t gotten whatever it was he wanted from Mum. I remind myself not to be harsh. He’s never seen anyone with Alzheimer’s before. He’s a lecturer of philosophy but he doesn’t understand.

Gail thinks differently. “When we were alone in Mum’s room, Sam seized upon a photo of Mum,” she says. I know the one. It’s a large print on her dresser. In the picture she’s twenty and beautiful, with Mona Lisa eyes. “‘That’s how I remember Brenda,’ he said to me. Tears welled in his eyes. He browsed the room, slowly.” Chewing. Searching for something he’ll never find. “He walked over to Brenda’s bed, and picked up the stuffed snow-leopard toy. Mum’s favourite possession. I could feel the love in the room. He picked up the toy and cradled it a moment then set it down exactly as he’d found it. Perhaps it was his way of saying goodbye.”

_____________________________________________________________________


I go to Parklyn in the morning alone.

I enter the office to speak with the head nurse. As she finishes some paperwork I look around the room. There’s a sign on the wall that reads, ‘Respond To The Need, Not To The Behaviour.’ Fair enough. I take it to mean, as a reminder to staff: ‘these people will send you fucking insane with frustration if you don’t keep your cool, and see through the ranting, rocking, crying, spitting, sobbing, self-hitting, bed-wetting behaviour to whatever it is that the patient actually needs.’

But I don’t have that job any more, not since my brother and I arranged the Parklyn placement. I was never too good at caring for my mother. We didn’t have these snappy platitudes of wisdom on the walls of 3 Godson Street. And I could never get to a point of slick professionalism as a Carer, for I also happen to love Ma. Now I come in without the shield of occupation. Not as a worker but only as a person. And as a person you feel things - love, pain, your own needs. I write my own sign on the wall of my mind: ‘Respond To The Person, Not To Your Own Needs.’

I need the love of my mother. I need to know that she remembers me. But, in this place, my needs are epitaphs written in sand. In the wind of time they mean nothing.

Joy emerges from her filing cabinet clutching the blank Palliative Care document. She regards me with old tired eyes.

“Do you want your mother resuscitated?”

I don’t meet her eyes. I stare through the photocopied document with an unfocussed gaze.

“No,” I say. “If her heart stops beating then I don’t want her resuscitated. I don’t want her to go through any more tests. I don’t want to put her through any more medical procedures.”

Joy pushes the document towards me to sign.

_____________________________________________________________________


My mother walks and then crouches. We don’t talk much. I show her a copy of National Geographic with pictures of Proboscis Monkeys. She isn’t too interested in them. She keeps turning to the back cover with a picture of a wolf. She wraps the magazine into the folds of her dress and carries it around with her like a treasure. I hold her other hand in my own, trembling. As we’re walking she raises my arm and kisses the back of my hand. I close my eyes and weep without tears for the smallest of things. Like a kiss, or a signature.

There’s so many things I’d like to say to her, so many things I’d like to ask. But I don’t. She whispers something to me that I can’t understand.

“I know, Mum. I know. I love you, Ma.”

A kiss as small as a signature on a photocopied document.

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The plot always thickens. The sound from its many mouthpieces becomes so dense that it rises to a screaming. But perhaps too, in the din, there are echoes of a simplicity. So faint that it cannot be heard no matter how hard you listen, and so far that it cannot be found no matter how hard you look. Just whispers in words that make no sense. You could cast words to call it love but it’s a love so streaked through with the pain and the guilt and the longing of being alive that the colours all blend into white. An every-thing that is also no-thing. Like the whiteness of the morphine patch on my mother’s arm.

I don’t really know if she remembers me or not. And the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it doesn’t matter all that much.

“I love you, Ma. I love you...” The words spill from my lips so easily it’s as if I haven’t spoken at all.

She touches the fabric of my shirt before I turn to go. That’s enough.

The Cookie Crumbles

Non-Fiction
Location – Melbourne, Australia
Written – April 2009
[This story was published in ‘Wet Ink’ magazine Issue 17, in December 2009.]

It began with a pair of legs. The heat brought the short skirts, and singlet tops. I was polite, I’d wait until she’d walked past before dropping my gaze to her ass, and her legs. Just a quick glance, there’s no need to be unprofessional about it. My mind filled in the rest.

I don’t remember when I first saw her. It wasn’t that kind of moment. She didn’t arrive at the workplace, she seeped into it - into long hours, the mindless toil, and the emptiness of the bustling office. So many people come and go in this place that you don’t pay much attention. As a supervisor said to me, “it’s like Vietnam in here - you don’t get too attached to anybody.”

It doesn’t really matter what I do. It’s a keyboard, and a computer screen. In the spare moments I write in my journal, or read the newspaper. I read the articles about the war in Gaza. My brother is in Sderot, with his Israeli girlfriend. The last time I spoke to him he had to drop the phone as a Qassam rocket came crashing into town. I imagine him safe, I and wonder what we’ll talk about when he returns. I skip the articles about the economic crisis. I hear enough about that on my cigarette breaks, from workmates whose stories don’t make the headlines. Sometimes while I work I’ll look around at the faces of my co-workers. And that’s when I began to notice her.

She smiles. Her teeth break free like a gap in the clouds. Clothed in one of her colourful dresses, with swirls of blue, and white. She doesn’t look like the others. She might be Spanish, or South American, and that lure of the exotic runs straight from your genes to your jeans. She might have lived on the edge of the Amazon jungle, bathing naked in the cool water. Or she may be the only daughter of a Colombian drug lord, who’d kill me if he found us languishing in tangled sheets. She could be from anywhere. But that doesn’t matter too much, either.

We’ve never spoken. I’m not shy. I’ve built up a repertoire of sarcastic one-liners that I use to break the ice with new co-workers. But I avoid her, and the guilt that comes with the idea of her.

I’ve been with my girlfriend for four years. And we have an adult understanding that, sometimes, we will be attracted to other people. This is to be human. Crossing the line is to act, to move from an attraction to something else. So I don’t. If I talk to the Spanish girl I might discover we have a mutual love for Herman Hesse, or Thai curries. She might play with her hair and laugh at my jokes, even when they’re not funny. I’m wary of her.

We reach a pleasant stalemate. Our only language is spoken through the silence of the eyes. She’ll leave her terminal to take a break in the alley, and pass me on the way. She returns my gaze with effortless calm. With eyes that speak of neither fear, nor glittering friendliness - just a cool awareness of things. A readiness, for whatever could happen next. These wordless conversations linger, like old friends. I don’t nod, or smile. I’m the first to look away.

When she walks past my eyes slip down again to her ass, and her legs. I try not to, but it happens anyway. It’s a natural thing, like influenza. She has that endless tan, a tan that has nothing to do with two weeks on a Bali beach. The tan is only punctuated by the reality of her hemline.

This isn’t the time for dreaming. My computer demands input.

I can’t afford to be fired. My girlfriend lost her job a couple of weeks ago. Her company got the job agency to deliver the news. Cowards. She got off the phone in tears. I held her, on the train platform, and told her not to worry.

“I’ll try to pick up some extra shifts,” I said. “We’ll be okay.”

But it isn’t so easy. People have been flooding towards dead-end jobs like mine, as they’re laid off from their regular jobs. Most are older than myself. You can tell they’re of a different breed, by the way they come in wearing suits, and black dresses. The veterans of this job are lucky to come in wearing shoes. This influx has meant there’s more competition for shifts. I’ve started coming to work early, to squeeze a few extra dollars from every shift I can get. But I’m getting so few that I earn less than the dole.

The rumour floating around the alley is that management is flooding in the new workers to cut costs. The recruits are paid at the training rate. My guess is that once they’ve completed their training period, they’ll start getting the ‘sorry, we can’t offer you any shifts this week’ line, too. There’s plenty of people out there to replace them.

A while back I tried to find new work. I’d go to the library to use their free internet, and send off dozens of applications through the job-search websites. It’s quick, easy, and pointless. There’s less jobs advertised than there used to be. I didn’t get a single phone call. The rejection emails told me they’re sorry, they’ve had a large volume of enquiries about the position, and good luck out there in the cold. I could have tried harder. I devote a larger section of my mind to masturbation fantasies than I do to job hunting.

There’s a syndicate at my work, for Tattslotto tickets. Kat, the older lady who sits at the terminal behind me, buys one every week. There’s always a ticket on her computer, sitting next to the crime novels she borrows from the library.

“It isn’t about the prize money,” she says. “I’d just love to be able to quit this job, and never have to work a six-day week again.”

My Dad says you don’t pay for Lotto tickets expecting to win. You pay for a week of fantasy.

My friend Dean has been working this job for years. His passion is birds. Before this job, he co-authored a field guide on Australian birds, and travelled widely in search of exotic species. He’s reluctant to talk about it. Happy memories can bring pain, too. Then he surprises me. He says he wants to go to Thailand at the end of the year. Go ‘birding’ there. He shows me pictures of Thai birds on his mobile. His eyes light up as he tells me about them. I don’t share his enthusiasm, but I ask him dozens of questions anyway, just to keep that glimmer in his eyes. After working in dead-end jobs long enough, you realize that fuelling these fragile sparks of passion is the truest sort of friendship there is.

I encourage him to book a flight. He’s starting to falter.

“But I’m not getting anywhere near enough work to save the money,” he says. “The bills are coming in.”

“You could always take out a loan.”

Dean just laughs. Unlike myself, he does read articles on the economy.

I don’t know what the Spanish girl dreams of. Is she an aspiring artist? Does she yearn to return home, and visit her family? Does she dream of love? Of learning to dive beneath the sea? I know she doesn’t dream of being here. So what is her fantasy? I’d like to ask. But I can’t, for she’s become one of mine. And dreams, too, can destroy you.

I go out to smoke a cigarette. I rolled one before logging out, so they won’t dock my pay. I pull it from my pocket. I spark it up in the alley, surrounded by garbage. The garbage festers in the heat, but the smoke kills the smell. Summer rain begins plopping down, and I take shelter beneath a scrap of overhanging sheet-metal. As I smoke, alone in the alley, she opens the door and steps outside.

Our eyes meet. It’s just the two of us there. She stops. There’s no way we can get away without saying something to each other.

“Oh! It’s raining!” She says.

“Yeah,” I reply. “That’s the way the cookie crumbles.”

She smiles, and holds her jacket up over her head as she turns to go, protecting herself from the rain. She rushes off, as if trying to out-run the weather. She’s finished her shift and headed home.

The next day something has changed. She usually sits up the other end of the office, and our faces only sometimes cross paths. She sat up there for months. Today she moves closer, close enough that I can hear the clack of her keyboard. You can tell a lot from that sound - whether someone is calm and composed, or whether someone is having a bad day. Her clack is in light, joyous little clicks, that bounce like music. She’s happy.

The young bloke sitting next to her reaches out his hand and starts rubbing her back, in slow, soft circles. She’s at ease with the touch. His chair is rolled over next to hers. He whispers something in her ear. I look down and clack something into my keyboard. There’s a squeal of giggles as he tickles her. I look up, reluctantly, to see their beaming smiles.

The cookie crumbles.

I don’t mind. There’s work to be done, and my girlfriend is at home waiting for me. Despite the games I play with myself, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll return tomorrow. In pure fantasy nothing can be gained, or lost. I pause, as the dreams dissipate into the fluorescent office air. Then, when I’m satisfied they’ve been banished away, I return to my computer screen.