Jacarandah

My granddad was a railway engineer. Not the man who drove the train, but the one who designed, built and repaired it. When I knew him, he was retired but he always “went to work” out in his shed which was bursting with tools, elaborate models and invented devices. He never spoke to me much, but I was allowed to sit with him “at work”, engaged in a project of my own at the little workbench he made for me. Granddad was steady and deliberate in his movements, his blue-grey eyes with their fierce bushy brows always fixed intently on the task. I tried to be interesting to Granddad, prattling about my dog, my baby sister’s latest tricks, or showing him some treasure from the garden, but he would only ever mutter, “Yes, Carolyn” or “Mmhmm” in that typical adult-ignoring-you way. Dad said Granddad didn’t talk much because he had been in the War, but that didn’t make a lot of sense to a five year old. If anything, it ought to give you lots of exciting things to talk about!

Well eventually, Granddad started to go blind. The workshop became dim and dusty while he just sat on the verandah listening to the radio. I remember one day I was playing in the garden when I found a twig of jacarandah flowers. After twirling them around like dancing fairies for a while, I took them up to the house to show everyone.

“Look, Granddad,” I said, unthinking, “they’re just like little purple gloves!”

Granny patted me and said in her sad Scots burr, “He canna’ see them darling.”

Granddad put the flowers to his cheek. “I can see them,” he said. “Just like little gloves.”

Just a few weeks later my sister and I were sitting on the back steps when we heard the phone ring. This was not common but we were unconcerned until we heard a rising note of distress in our mother’s voice. We nestled in close to each other, including our cocker spaniel, Bosun, in the huddle. “Has something happened to Daddy?” Blin asked, wide-eyed. “No,” I said with eight-year-old authority, “It’ll just be Granddad.” “Make it so,” I prayed inside.

It was. He had been hit by a car at a pedestrian crossing near his home. He could hardly see, but he had been too proud to let anyone guide him, or even to use a cane. And of course it was all my fault. I had actually prayed to God for him to die. The fact that I had done it to save my dad made me feel a little better, but it was my first real experience of death and I felt horribly guilty and quite frightened at the thought of my own power! Of course it was not possible to tell anyone – I would probably be put in gaol or at least get into terrible trouble. I brooded over it for months.

Finally one day I took out my coloured pencils and my good sketchbook and drew a picture of Granddad in Heaven. I didn’t have much of a clue what it was like up there, so I put in lots of flowers and a dog. I had trouble drawing hands, so I ingeniously put a bunch of jacarandah in Granddad’s hands. It still needed something so I drew the most beautiful princess with a golden crown, smiling at him. Then I hid the drawing away in a cupboard. Somehow, everything was going to be all right now.

The Selkies

Corbin says to the priest, “The girl can’t remember her name.”

But she remembers the sea swell and the taste of salt. She remembers the flexing of her own sleek body against the currents, and the sunlight splintering like green glass on the water. She will remember these things even when she is an old woman, sitting in a comfortable chair, her knees covered with a grey woollen rug. Even though they have never been put into words, she will remember.

The priest says, “Then she must be christened first. She will be Mary Marina, because Our Lady delivered her from the sea. The marriage can come after.”

She looks up into the eyes of this man, Corbin, and although he had tricked her and stolen her from her own people, she knows that she could care for him and be his wife. Corbin, for his part, had been enchanted by the selkies as they shed their seal skins and danced in the moonlight. He knew that he would never be satisfied with an ordinary woman, so he had taken her skin and hidden it. Everyone knew that this was the way to trap a selkie and prevent her from returning to the sea, but the villagers keep up the polite fiction that she was the sole survivor of a shipwreck. After all, every one of them has lived by the sea long enough to witness miracles, and it is whispered that several are themselves descended from the sea people.

Corbin and Mary Marina are married in the tiny stone church on the wild west coast. It is a stormy day and the howling winds and lashing waves nearly drown the old priest’s words, but it seems right that the sea is present. Selkies make docile and loving partners, unlike some of the more treacherous inhabitants of the deep, but they are always torn, always they long for the water with half of their heart. In time Mary Marina bears two children, a boy named Dairmid and girl, Sian. Both have sleek brown hair and their fingers and toes are slightly webbed. They go down to the sea each day with their mother and fish or gather cockles. When the weather is wild, all three of them sit at the window of the cottage and watch the ocean raging, and when the storm is over they go to gather up the driftwood, wounded seabirds and any treasures the waters have given up.

One evening Dairmid is roused by a strange dream, but waking, he still hears the music. On the beach below he sees the women dancing and singing in the light of the full moon. As he creeps toward them, a shell cracks beneath his foot and the startled selkies rush for their seal skins and disappear beneath the waves like grey shadows. In the morning, Dairmid wonders if he dreamed it all. He is a young man, only fifteen, but from that night on, Dairmid is changed. He wakes each night to gaze hopefully at the strand, and he tells Corbin that he will be a sailor, as soon as he can get a place on a merchantman or in the navy.

Sian is quiet like her mother, and from earliest childhood she has helped around the home. One day she is sorting through some old boxes in the cellar when she finds a locked chest. For some reason she has to know what is inside, and, in a strange, driven mood she prises it open with a kitchen knife. Inside is a piece of parchment-like skin, dry and leathery on one side, and on the other covered with a smooth dark coat of hair. She drapes the thing over her shoulders and walks slowly down to the water’s edge. Out in the bay, sleek dark heads are bobbing, lithe bodies are twisting in the waves. She leaves her little pile of clothing on the sand and wraps herself tight in the seal skin. As Sian plunges into the green water, her mother and father call desperately from the cottage doorway. But the girl cannot remember her name.

 

Ultramarine

Because he was a slave and not a real person, Azul never thought of keeping the stone for himself. He could own nothing, not even his own sweating, sinewy body. But he held it for a moment, feeling its heft – too big to hold in one hand – and gazing at the flat edge exposed by his pick. Azul had never seen a more brilliant blue. As he turned the stone, tiny flecks of gold caught the light. It was like the night sky, frozen into rock. Azul presented it to his master, bowing his head low. Perhaps he would receive extra bread, or at least a day free from beating. The slave master presented the stone to his master, who saw it for what it was: lapis lazuli – a huge ultramarine of the finest colour. He too hefted it and gazed into its depths. Its destiny was clear. He would have it fashioned into a beautiful vessel, or a votive figure, to be presented to the Great Shah, in the expectation of certain favours, of course.

People said of the sculptor Shama that he could persuade cold stone into the softness of rose petals or women’s breasts. Shama himself always said that it was a matter of waiting for the stone to give birth, of assisting it to bring forth the form that had always been within. Now Shama gazed at the blue stone in his turn. Unlike the slave and his masters, the sculptor had seen the great Middle Sea on his travels, and he thought the lapis must be a solid fragment of that vast blueness, frozen in ancient times and buried in the mountains. As he meditated, the stone took shape in his mind as a chalice, a perfect vessel representing the heavens and the seas reflecting them – two perfect hemispheres of translucent blue flecked with gold. Between the two, linking them, would be the whole creation: mountains, trees, animals and two ideal human forms, male and female. No-one had ever attempted a project of such infinite delicacy; it would be his master work. Shama prepared his tools with special care, cleansed himself and made a fitting sacrifice. Once he began, he knew, the work would steal from him his sleep, his meals and his whole mind until it was completed. Shama took up his chisel and felt the familiar trance descend upon him, so he knew the gods were present. But at the first, tentative blow, there was a terrible cracking sound and a deep ugly fissure split the rock. A web of tiny fractures spread across its face, like a gust of wind disturbing the water. The glorious ultramarine lay in a thousand fragments, golden specks glinting with cruel mockery in the early sunlight. Shama didn’t hesitate. His reputation and perhaps his very life lay shattered on the bench before him. He scooped the crumbs of stone into a sack, grabbed his tools, roused his horse and disappeared into the morning mist.

Lycidas the merchant knew he had made a fabulous deal. That poor sculptor had been desperate, and had had little idea of the value of the ultramarine he sold so hastily. Lycidas would sell it for at least a hundred times what he had paid, once he put the stone on the market back in Venice. He let some of the crumbs trickle through his fingers. Yes, this deep ocean blue, the rarest and most precious of pigments, more valuable than gold.

It was time. The Doge himself sat down on his carved golden throne, the signal for all to take their seats. Giovanni felt the sweat on his neck and forehead despite the cool white marble of the palace. He bowed low as he drew back the dark velvet curtain to reveal his work at last. And there she was, his Madonna. Her sweet, sad face; the joy of new motherhood shadowed by the knowledge of suffering to come. Her soft arms and breast offering comfort to the holy child and to the human sinner alike. And enveloping her like a cloud, like the grace of God, the shimmering blue cloak of ultramarine, an intimation of Heaven itself.

The Last Straw

Angelo and Maria sat entwined on the warm sand, watching the sun’s last red gold streaks reflected on the gently swelling sea. It had been a wonderful day, but now it was time to go. They trudged regretfully up the beach, leaving behind them a water bottle, an empty sunscreen tube, a Fanta can and a plastic bag that still held the wrappers of their hamburgers. Night fell and a few shy hermit crabs scuttled about, but found nothing of interest. At about 5 am, the land breeze started up, ruffling the sea and sending the plastic bag cartwheeling, shedding its paper along the way. A strong gust lifted it into the air and it rolled and fluttered higher, heading far out to sea.

The bag touched down on the water, trapping a little air and trailing its handles, looking for all the world like a drifting jellyfish. This was unfortunate, because jellies are the staple diet of sea turtles, and a large female Green Turtle was now approaching. Her powerful flippers swept her forward and she lunged to snap down on the plastic bag, chomping it rhythmically. It did not disintegrate like a jellyfish, but lodged in her throat, one handle wrapping around her lower jaw. Turtles have a slow metabolism and of course they can go for up to half an hour without needing a gulp of air, so hers was a drawn out death as she struggled in vain to breathe. With her died a hundred or more fertile eggs that she was going to lay in the warm sands of Lampedusa, the last of her species to breed on the island.

A few gulls and predatory fish would go hungry without the annual feast of tiny turtles, but the main effect would not be evident until two or three years later. Fishermen on the island were always complaining that their catch was ‘not like back in the good old days’, but now they were becoming alarmed. There were still a few big fish to be caught – tuna and swordfish – but the schools of sardines, the mainstay by which they made a living, had dwindled to almost nothing. They all noticed that jellyfish were much more plentiful, from the tiny fluorescent comb jellies to the large golden brown ones with tentacles trailing a metre or more. They didn’t realise that the jellyfish population had spiralled out of control because of the absence of their only predator, the Green Turtle, and that jellyfish prey mainly upon the tiny fry of fish and crustaceans. So the situation continued to worsen each year, and the fishermen began to joke grimly that their wives would have to come up with recipes for jellyfish, or they would starve.

Over the next decade, all the fishing families moved on, to the mainland or further afield. Some joined the mega-trawling fleet that was mopping up the last of the Mediterranean’s tuna. The schools and the bank closed, then the general store and the café where the old men had sat and discussed politics each morning. Before long all that was left was a heap of derelict wooden boats and rotting nets. Only a tribe of large rats inhabited the waterfront – the cats had left with the fishermen.

After they had eaten all the rubbish, the rats turned to the island’s lizards and the eggs and chicks of birds. When these were all gone, they ate the vegetation. By the time the last rat starved to death, Lampedusa’s topsoil had eroded and blown way, leaving only the bare rock baking in the fierce sun. There were legends about the island, its once-fertile fields and teeming seas, but looking at the barren landscape, they were difficult to believe. Perhaps even more difficult to believe was that the last straw had been a discarded plastic bag.

What I Did in the Holidays

As the child of  workaholic parents, I had no experience of the classic Australian ‘family holiday’, that utopian dream of camping, fishing and boating that my classmates wrote about at the start of term under the title, ‘What I did in my Holidays’. I read about their adventures with envy, so when my parents announced that we were going on a driving holiday to visit my uncle in Kalgoorlie, my sister and I were delirious with anticipation. Dad was full of tales of C Y O’Connor’s pipeline, Paddy Hannan and gold nuggets as big as your hand. We would have four cousins to play with, we would try prospecting and go down a mineshaft!

I don’t know what possessed my normally rational parents. It was the height of summer and our car was a tiny black Morris Minor. Air-conditioning was unheard of, and we would have to cram in two large rigid cases and a tank of water, along with us two kids and our toys. We set off in high spirits for a return trip of 750 miles. Blin and I sang advertising jingles and themes from TV shows – The Flintstones, Gilligan’s Island, The Beverley Hillbillies. We had a giant bag of lollies – cobbers, sherbies, milk bottles – that we planned to ration out carefully to last the trip. Driving over the Darling Range an hour later, our repertoire of songs and our lolly bag were exhausted. Blin felt sick. My mother had gone quiet and my father was pointing out the sights (jarrah, marri and wandoo trees) with increasing desperation. We started a half-hearted argument to pass the time, then I poked Blin and she bawled herself to sleep. A mob of kangaroos enlivened things a little before I dozed off too.

When we woke up, hot, sticky and cranky, we had arrived at Great Aunt Ida’s house in Kellerberrin, a farming town in the outer Wheat Belt that would be our overnight stay. Blin and I were quite put out when we learned that Great Aunt Ida was not in fact great; she was just our mother’s aunt. Aunt Ida was of the opinion that our trendy Bermuda shorts were unladylike, that greyish mutton stew was a fine dinner for a hot summer night, and that little girls who didn’t clean their plates were not entitled to watermelon. Next day we escaped as quickly as possible after a breakfast of congealed oatmeal and sundry observations about my ugly freckles and my sister’s prominent ears. While Blin and I bickered in a desultory fashion, mum sat in grim silence while dad held forth frantically on the effects of superphosphate on wheat production in marginal farmland. Aeons later, our little car was puttering through a post-apocalyptic landscape of slagheaps and scaffolding. We were there.

The ten days in Kalgoorlie passed in a blur. We slept in bunks in our cousin Alison’s room, taking her side against her three wild, boisterous brothers. We went prospecting and found beautiful chunks of rose quartz, some with tiny flecks of gold. We did a scary descent down a mine and looked at all the artefacts from the 1860s in the museum. Our oldest cousin even took us on a bike ride to stare at all the ‘bad ladies’ in the red light district. It was all quite an education for a couple of nice girls from the northern suburbs.

Then, sadly, it was back into the little black Morrie for the long drive back. Miles and miles of featureless scrub, my sister whining beside me and dad lecturing cheerfully about termite mounds, we crawled westwards. A dusty motel and fish fingers were infinitely preferable to Great Aunt Ida, and we got to stay up late and scare ourselves witless watching ‘The Twilight Zone’. Back at school on Monday, I grinned contentedly as I took up my pen…