Author: mascara

Luke Johnson’s stories have been published in HEAT, Going Down Swinging and Island. He is a PhD student at University of Technology, Sydney and has taught creative writing at University of Wollongong. He lives in Mt Keira with his wife and son.

A Near-Death Interruption

So I hanged myself. From the cherrywood bookcase in your study. Where you used a silk cravat and volumes one through to six of The complete works of William Shakespeare, I used a length of rope and three-rung aluminium stepladder. It was not a sexualised thing, mine. That is to say, I was not waxing lyrical with my piece in my hand at the time and there was no pantyhose crotch pulled down to my nostrils or soiled undergarment stuffed into the foyer of my oesophagus. No, it was just a regular morbid suicide attempt, with all of my clothes on and none of anybody else’s. Yours, you old romantic you, was slightly more playful.

            Strange word this hanged, before I go any further. Strange both connotatively and syntactically. Connotatively, it insists completion of deed, success of task, it insists death, does it not? But why? I mean, that I persevered where you perished, does this somehow imply I did not hang? Of course I hanged (syntactically the word shows all the deference of a fourteen year old wielding a can of spray-paint). Believe you me I hanged. I felt the lead in my veins rushing to fill my toes, the mercury in my eyeballs swishing side to side like the water inside two precariously-placed fishbowls. Hey, not only did I hang, but I also swung (swing, now there is a teenager who knows how to conjugate respectfully). I swung and hanged as you must have swung and hanged, without rhythm and without breath. Like a starfish. Back and diagonal. Forthways and sideways. A real swinger and hanger, me. A real chip off the old echinodermic block.

            After cutting me down, hanged though defiantly alive, they rushed me to A&E, where a white-haired doctor was impatient and cold-handed and an auburn-haired nurse played pretty and flirtatious. Not flirtatious with me so much, I was in no state to reciprocate her winks and pouts anyway, but with the ambulance driver who had brought me in certainly. The two of them waited for the doctor to finish his examination, then together they lifted me off the ambulance gurney and onto another bed with wheels. ‘He must have pissed himself after he passed out,’ the debonair driver whispered intimately while she his silver-time-piece-chested lover took count of my pulse and wiggled her button nose. Oh it was sweet being at the centre of their lovesick innuendos, and I must say, father, the smell of my soiled woollen trousers did not embarrass or cause me any special concern, not after seeing what you did to the back seat of those fishnet stockings, you old dog.

            After only a short period of lying around like this mother arrived at the hospital. You remember mother, right?

‘You tried to hang yourself?!’ Part question, part exclamation. As difficult to separate as the Catholicism and Spanishness. If forced I should guess the exclamation portion of it belonged mostly to tried and Spain, and the question portion mostly to Jesus and hang.

‘Is that what they have told you?’ I replied coolly. This, after all, was a public hospital in Taunton, father, and no place for me to be acting all sulky now, not in front of such noble creatures as this nurse and her driver, working on a pittance as I am sure they were. ‘Well, okay, if that is what they have told you then. Did they mention the bit about me pissing myself also?’ I could see the hurt in mother’s eyes and wanted to let the ink run. Oh, the magnificent blueness of it.

 ‘Is this the kind of boy I have raised?’ she responded quietly, putting her hands to her chest to fondle that cleavage-stricken Christ of hers as she was prone to doing in times of distress, like some clean-necked virgin fending off a house of vampires with nothing but her clever little talisman. ‘The kind who would try such a thing as this? To hang himself? Hang himself!’ With the second hang she turned away from me and tugged down on the Christ with such force its silver chain could only sharpen the briefest line across the back of her neck before snapping clean in half. For a moment I though she might have been weeping. Then she swung back to face me, still clutching in her tight little fist that miniature figure who would not have looked out of place between the letters S and U. ‘Not to mention poor Marcella. Tell me you are not so selfish you would attempt such a thing.’

I was impervious. ‘Must we go on about Marcella?’ I yawned. ‘The woman really should start knocking before entering a room. The sound of a knot tightening around a neck must ring in her ears like some kind of high-pitched dog whistle.’

Mother moved to slap me but stopped herself. ‘You would mock your father like this?’ she scolded beneath her breath. ‘Talking about his accident like some funny joke. In front of any-old person.’

 ‘Yes, father’s accident.’ I looked past mother and at the nurse, who in turn looked past me and at the driver. She may have even winked to him: code of course, for, How about a handjob in the janitor’s, my love? The two of them left the room hurriedly then and it was just mother and I. Allowing the sarcasm to inflect my voice with its nasally undertones and offbeat emphases, I continued. ‘That accidental morning in accidental August. What an accidental shame it was.’

This time mother’s hand connected well with my cheek, the Christ getting his own piece of the retribution too. ‘That you would even dream.’ The jolt of the slap frightened me only half as much as it frightened her, I think. You must remember, father, this is the woman who used to eroticise me into syrupy slumbers by smearing her own areolas with honey, her little Alberry and custard dumpling—just look at him suck himself to sleep! And now, thirty-seven years on, showing more concern for the fragile disposition of the cleaner than for her own lacteal kin—what heartbreak!

I touched the stung spot with the back of my hand. ‘Yes, poor Marcella and her poor sweet cleaner lady’s life. And poor father too. Poor you and poor me, while I am at it. And rest assured, mother, none of it is true.’ Lies, lies, lies. ‘They have confused me for one of the other boys on the ward. Hang myself? I was only trying to gratify myself sexually. I swear it. It is a Briton’s pastime. I will show you the rope burn on my penis if you do not believe me. A boy like me getting mixed up in a thing like suicide! Even when Laudie left me, even then I did not contemplate putting a noose around my neck for the purpose of killing myself. Not to mention death being the most thorough talent scout there is, mother. If I had shown potential for a thing like suicide, then believe you me, death would have sniffed me out at a very early age, set me up for life, scholarship and all. No this is just a case of pushing the boundaries of perversion too far. The apple and the tree and all that proximity talk. Oh, please do apologise to Marcella for me. What a dreadful mix-up.’

Mother looked at me, studied me. And then she huffed. And then she left the room. And smiling, I went to sleep.

An hour or so later I awakened to find in mother’s place a woman whose makeup promised to outlast her face, whose foundation alone seemed heavy enough to negatively preserve her features for at least another three hundred years, to a time when Western Europe’s frescos will be dissolved into camera-flash oblivion and the gothic clocks of Bavaria cried for like the felled trees of fictitious Amazonia. And in place of my woollen trousers, father, complementing the shift from mother’s moody toddler to psychiatrist’s prized patient quite well, I think, a sort of plastic-legged skirt with these built-in elastic-legged pantaloon thingies.

            ‘Your admission card says Albert,’ Tutankhamen’s lovechild insisted. I do not remember for how long we had been arguing the point. Though I do recall that at one juncture she even went so far as to show me where the name had been filled in: Albert Dean Childes, silent s and all.

            ‘It is an error,’ I explained to her.

            ‘Not according to your mother, Albert.’

            ‘According to my mother my uncle is the rightful king of Denmark. Who are you going to believe?’

            ‘Do you think this kind of talk impresses me, Albert?’

            ‘Hamlet,’ I corrected her. She said nothing. I went on. ‘No, I do not suppose so. Would you be more impressed if I told you the real king of Denmark wore ladies’ stockings and used lipstick in place of Vaseline?’

            She stood up and moved her chair slightly closer to me. Or perhaps she did not move it any closer at all, but rather just stood up and sat down again to give the impression of having moved closer. Either way, I found myself near enough to identify each swamped hair follicle now. Her eyelashes looked like they had endured the most recent Exxon disaster. Her upper lip was a Puerto Rican mudslide. 

            ‘I know all about what happened to your father, Albert.’ She seemed to be whispering at me.

            ‘You like to remind people of their names, don’t you, doctor?’ I deepened my voice, doing my best to match her gravity.

            ‘Now, I never said I was a doctor, Albert. If you must know I hold an Honours degree from the University of Warwick and a Masters from Somerset.’

            I frowned. Felt played. Found myself yearning for mother who wore her heart and diploma on her sleeve.

            ‘Albert, you are not expected to be unmoved by what happened to your father.’ She put her hand on the bed, next to my shoulder, to assure me some. She seemed to know you so well, father, know all of your moves. What if she had leaned forward next and rubbed her cleanly-shaven chin against my forehead, to kiss me good night? Would I have begun sucking my thumb and wet myself a third time?

            ‘Unmoved, why of course not,’ I said to her. And to some degree, meant it too. It was after all quite a shock to us, father, to learn of the promiscuous double life you had invented for yourself. When we found you, the tip of your penis was squeezed out through the top end of your fist like a tongue between two pursed lips, and the pearly sequins on the fronts of your stiletto heels shone up at us like droplets of you-know-what. And whatever shade of lipstick that was, smeared around the edges of that makeshift orifice, well, mother has refrained from restocking her supply—from wearing lipstick altogether in fact. The poor woman, since your death her lips have taken the semblance of a pair of mating slugs just doused in salt. You know what else, father? I cannot help but wonder whether the whole scene was not staged for mother’s benefit in the first place, aimed at notifying her of some sexual underperformance on her part. That you went so far as to make a face of your fist. Nothing subtle about that. Tell me I am not on to something.

            ‘It must have been very distressing. Your mother tells me it was your aunt who discovered him.’

            ‘It is an affectation,’ I said to the Master of Psychology graduate with her hand upon the mattress beside my left shoulder. ‘Marcella is not really my aunt. Just a cleaner.’

            ‘She seems to care for you a great deal. She was here earlier while you were sleeping.’

            ‘Did she try to tip anything in my ear? That is how she did father, you know? She has been with us a very long time, but is completely untrustworthy.’

            ‘Your mother tells me you were homeschooled, Albert.’

            I nodded. Silently. I did not dare speak in fear of divulging information on the chivalrous suicide vow I had made to an already-spoken-for Beatrice during our grade-three reading of La Vita Nova, father. Sure evidence of my long-term psychological state.

            Continuing unprompted, ‘Your father was in charge of your education? Or your mother?’

            ‘My father taught me the humanities and sciences, and my mother the guidelines for a healthy soul. Neither was in charge. A person’s education is his own charge.’ I was churning it out now.

            ‘And your father was a professor too. At Somerset. I remember him from one of my own classes, would you believe?’

            ‘Some kind of professor, yes.’

‘A very clever man.’

            ‘With an ear for trouble.’

            ‘Hmm,’ she said. Then, ‘I would like permission to speak with your wife, Albert.’

            ‘My wife is deceased,’ I told my interrogator.

            ‘That is not what your mother has told me.’

            ‘My mother was in charge of discipline, if that is what you mean by in charge. Though she was a forgiving disciplinarian. If father sent me to her for corporal punishment, then she would close the door and beat on a cushion and I would moan in time with each stroke. She stopped smearing honey on her teats when I was two.’

            ‘We are talking about your wife now, Albert.’

            ‘Is it important?’

            ‘Very.’

‘Yes, poor Laudie,’ I said. ‘She drowned in a terrible house fire, you know. It makes me too sad to mention. Sorry I cannot be of more help. I have long suspected her brother of foul play. A chap with washboard abdominals.’

            She gave me a stern smile. Her nose might have fallen to ruins along with a swag of other famous decayed noses, led of course by the Sphinx (the answer is man! I thought to yell). ‘Okay, Albert, I will visit you again later this evening. We must talk seriously before I can allow you to leave. It is necessary for my report. You see me carrying my reports, don’t you?’

            ‘I see nothing I am not supposed to see.’

            But that was not entirely true either, father. From my bed beside the window I could see the advertisement for the cheap carpet warehouse pasted on the back of the bus shelter down below. Some stand-in with a cartoonish face who had been paid to put on a pair of tights and pose himself in a manner befitting the tagline To carpet or not to carpet? That is the question. You will agree, father, it is a disgrace the way they exploit the classics like that.

Maria Takolander’s poetry, fiction and essays have been widely published. She is the author of a book of poems, Ghostly Subjects (Salt, 2009), which was shortlisted for a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award in 2010. She is also the winner of the 2010 Australian Book Review Short Story Competition. She is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies and Creative Writing at Deakin University in Geelong.
 

Hide

Night has settled through the house like silt. My bedroom is as dark as my nursery memory of it, as dark as my child brain, which is only beginning to build an image of the world inside my skull cave. The plaster walls are what I remember the most, although I think of them not in terms of paint colour or wall paper but only in terms of their hidden chalkiness and how they persist in the shadows. I remember, too, the framed cavity where the door hangs open to the darkness of the hallway, and the draped space where the window is allowed to exist untroubled by day. I remember nothing about the furnishings, although I assume—or is this a memory?—that in the room there is a foam mattress and bedclothes colourless as the walls. And I assume that I am on that bed, too, although I cannot see myself or feel myself on it. It is as if I do not exist in the world. It is as if I am like the shadows. But I know that I exist because I know that, out there, beyond my bedroom door, something terrible is happening.

            My sister, barefoot in her synthetic, pale-pink nighty, appears in my room, body-real and dangerous, urging me to leave with her, to come and help, even though I am not really there, even though I will never want anything less. Are there words for this child-whispering, for the flesh-and-blood crumbs she holds out to me, compelling me to come out of hiding, to cross the threshold into witnessing and remembering?

            Sometimes I think that the memory belongs to her and that she gave it to me, like a birthday cake, at a later time. But I must own this memory in some original way because I remember the warmth of her hand. I feel how her nylon nighty hides electricity as she leads me down the hallway, dense with night. And I see how the floorboards and wall in the hallway ahead, outside the entranceway to the lounge room, are striped by the streetlight entering through the Venetian blinds. I find myself remembering that, on some other night, strange men with shaved heads and tight jeans had gathered on the street outside the lounge room in packs and that a brown bottle had crashed through the window, tangling in the still-broken blinds. Another evening in the lounge room, abruptly littered with gifts, I had unwrapped a tin of colouring pencils next to the white figure of a tree fit for a storm.

            At the end of the hallway, past the striped light, there is a bedroom with its door ajar, behind which there appears to be a movie screening. I can tell by the yellow light streaming through the crack of the door and the loud voices and the skin noise that it is an adult movie, not a movie I want to see, not like the one about Mary Poppins, who has a friend—the smiling chimney sweep—and an umbrella like a lollipop with which to steal me away into the spangled night.

My sister, in her synthetic, pale-pink nighty, moves down the hallway towards the bedroom, pulling me behind her. When she reaches the bedroom door, with the vertical stripe of yellow light beaming along the door jamb and the movie playing inside turned suddenly quiet, she lets go of my hand. I watch as she touches the painted surface of the door with her fingertips. Then, from my position behind her night-gowned body and her outstretched arm, as the electric light, like radiation, floods her face, I look at what she is looking at. And I see what is on.

            There is a naked light bulb and a mirror, gilded and tricky, on the wall above a double bed that has a threadbare, purple coverlet. And there is a man kneeling on the rumpled, purple coverlet with his back to me. The blonde hair on the back of his head, which I can see directly in the bright room, is matted, and his face, which I can see in the shining space of the mirror, is flattened. His fists, which I look at in the glinting mirror and then in the luminous room, are clenched by his sides.

            My sister, standing in the frame of the door in front of me, lit up like a shard of glass by the sun, says something. She opens her lips and makes a sound. She says his name. She says it in a voice so small that it could be me who is saying it.

            The man turns, the yellow light bulb setting his face aglow. He is in the room, and he is in the mirror. He looks strange: empty or full. I wonder if there is a man behind his eyes. I am afraid, but he does not see me among the shadows. He looks at my sister in her pink nighty and in her skin, and she glimmers and burns while he flares and blazes like a fire lapped by the wind. When his mouth opens, he roars and leaps from the bed. The light is shattering.

            The door slams shut.

            I see a gush of air puff my sister’s hair and nightgown, and then suddenly there is my face and body cast like the living into the ashes of the night. I am aware of my skin and the way it covers my flesh and bones and of something else—strange, jagged and quiet—embedded within. But only after I glimpse, in all that razing light, a woman’s body—adult words: torso, arms, legs—on the purple coverlet, and a white, cotton nightgown—private word, child word: nighty, nighty—ripped on the floor.

*

Afternoon has settled through the house like a ghost of the day. I am older—just a little—and this is a room that I remember. I have hidden under the bed with the threadbare, purple coverlet, lying on my stomach on the dust-covered floorboards, feet to the headboard and the wall. The mirror, I know, is hanging above there, its depths swallowing light, but it helps that I cannot see it and that it cannot see me.

            What I can see, straight ahead of me, are the tapered, timber legs at the end of the bed, and the dangling, ragged fringes of the purple coverlet. I can also see the fourth and last drawer of a timber-laminated dressing table that occupies the wall at the foot of the bed. One of the handles on the bottom drawer is missing, and although I do not like the bronze shapeliness of the one that is there, I dislike even more the two, dark screw-holes in the timber where the handle was once attached. Between the bed and the dressing table is a stretch of clean floor, but beneath the dressing table is dust, so still, like a held breath, that the mirror cannot see it. There are maroon curtains to the right, hovering just above the varnished boards, with dust hidden beneath them, too, and a tall cupboard to the left, which is made of heavy timber and has doors that do not properly close. The hallway is also to the left, and I can see its emptiness through the open bedroom door.

            I am not alone. I have, clenched in my arms, squashed between my body and the floor, a toy clown. It is as big as me and so floppy in its limbs and neck that it might be broken. The fabric is felt-like and yellow-coloured where there is skin. It has yellow wool for hair, and its eyebrows and mouth are made from white sausage-shaped pieces of material. It has crosses in the place of eyes, sewn in inch-long, blue, woolen stitches, and it is clothed in a jumpsuit, which is fastened to its body at the ankles, wrists and neck and made from flannel patterned with images of children’s blocks, each with letters of the alphabet.

            The clown feels misshapen and fragile tangled beneath my body and in my crossed arms, but I am trying not to move, and I believe, in any case, that I will not be waiting here long. I breathe lightly through my nose so as not to disturb the yellow wool of the clown’s hair, which sticks out through my arms, or the dust on the floor in front of my face. I watch the vacant hallway through the frame of the open door.

            I have since been told—perhaps after looking at a photograph album, in which I remember seeing a badly lit image of myself on a vinyl kitchen chair with the clown in my arms—that I carried the clown everywhere with me as a child, until the day its head broke away from its torso and clots of wadding started to fall out. I know that the toy was pressed, as I slept one night, into one of the plastic bins crowded with shapeless rubbish bags in the dark, narrow yard at the side of the house. But I can remember having the toy clown with me only one other time.

            I was squatting with my sister in the backyard in the shadow of the grey paling fence. The grass there was lush and long. There were crickets, black and sleek, clinging to the blades of grass, and cobwebs packed in the crevices of the old fence like stuffing. I had my clown with me, bunched under one of my arms. My sister had her clown with her, too. We were listening to three children, older than both of us, playing on a trampoline on the other side of the fence. I remember that I wanted to look at them and that I wanted them to look at me, with a desire I felt in my crouched body as if it had been invaded by a stranger, reckless and ready to be unmasked. But climbing the fence was my sister’s idea.

            Standing next to her, with my toes on the middle rail of the fence and my fingers curled over the splintered wood of the top rail, I held my silence. My clown hung beside me, one of its yellow, fabric hands trapped between my hand and the rough timber of the fence. My sister had her clown with her, too, folded under her left arm. She peered over the ragged edges of the palings. I raised myself on my toes and peered over, too.

            I saw three dark-haired and bare-footed children on a trampoline in an otherwise empty backyard that looked much like ours. There was a fat girl, curled into a ball in the centre of the trampoline mat, and two boys, who were older than her. They were trying to make her bounce. The girl saw me and sat up. Her brothers then stopped and looked. They said things in a language I did not understand, but I recognised the slow smile on the girl’s face and the boys’ too-loud laughter, and I was glad that the worn fence was there, marking the edges of the known world. I climbed back down, and my sister climbed down after me. As I stood on the cool grass, holding the hand of my clown, there was nothing to be said. I remember the feeling of loneliness that comes with shame, that I looked to the dark windows of my house, but there my memory fails.

             My memory of the day that I lay under the bed with the purple coverlet, with my clown tucked in my arms, is clearer. I am waiting for my sister to come home from her first day at school.

            The hallway remains empty. The dust beneath the dressing table in front of me does not move. I look at the two, dark screw-holes in the veneered timber of the bottom drawer, where the bronze handle is missing. I think about the mirror on the wall above the bed, and I find that I am suddenly unsure.

            Should my sister be home by now? I no longer understand why I came to hide under the bed. Do I want my sister to come looking for me, or am I afraid that she will?

I hold the clown tightly and keep still, but I feel that I have been robbed of something, as if the mirror had been looking at me all this time after all.

*

The morning arrives with a dusky silence. With my sister, I walk down the hallway, past the empty lounge room with the damaged Venetian blinds, to the bedroom at the end. The maroon curtains are still drawn, the mirror, in the dimness, is closed onto itself, and the bed with the purple coverlet is unmade. The knotted fringes of the coverlet trail on the naked floorboards, and in the murkiness of the room they look like the legs of so many large spiders, all dead.

            I do not know what time it is, but I have been going to school for some months now—my sister for more than a year—and I understand what I have to do. I begin to get dressed. There is enough light coming through the curtain parting to enable me to see what I am doing. In the tall cupboard with the doors that cannot close, I find the short slip-dress with the blue swirling pattern, like marble, which I especially like, and a pair of white shoes. My sister chooses an orange dress with buttons. On the dressing table, there is a tube of lipstick, a bottle of mascara, a compact with three colours of eye-shadow—green, blue-green and blue—and a small round mirror with a retractable silver stand. I do not look at the dark mirror on the wall behind.

            Before I leave for school, my sister makes us both lunch in the kitchen, buttering four slices of black bread, which she pulls out of the plastic bag left on the table. I put my sandwich in my handbag. We leave the house, my sister making sure to close the front door behind us, and walk down the driveway. We pass the line of khaki-coloured succulents, which seep pus when the leaves snap, and turn onto the cement footpath. As we walk past our neighbour’s house, a squat woman in a smock, with curlers in her netted hair, rushes out from behind a screen door and across her front lawn. She grabs me by my wrist and my sister by her forearm. She looks at me as if I have forgotten something.

            And it is true that I have, for while I remember what happened that morning, I remember little of the preceding night. I assume, for instance, that there was a drive home from the hospital along streets fire-lit by headlights. I should be able to remember the private feeling of being in the backseat of the car in my dressing gown and, when I got home, the glow of the porch light and the sound of scoria under the tyres. Did I click on the bear-shaped night light on the floor next to my mattress when I got back into bed? Did I ask my sister to sleep with me then?

            But I remember nothing of the events that occurred after—or before—I saw the woman on a trolley, its wheels dark as ash and uneasy on the vinyl floor, disappear down the yawing hallway under the fluorescent lights of the hospital corridor, and the man with the blonde hair re-enter the waiting room, looking at the wall.