the summer student stasis & story-telling
I haven't found much to write about in here of late.
Exams are over, marks aren't yet out, and I've entered the student summer stasis - aka mindless, soul-sucking working. If I could have a non retail part-time job through the university year, I would seize it in a moment. However, retail is one of few options for a nineteen year old undergrad student.
So I'm working at Whitcoulls. I have friends, seniority, knowledge of how the whole she-bang goes down. I left it for Borders this time last year, and whilst it wasn't a bad experience, when I had job offers from both places upon my return to Aotearoa shores, I went back to Whitcoulls, my safety net. I started working there at the beginning of my last year at high school, and there are currently only two part time staff members who started working there before I did (and they are two of my good friends). It's fun, mostly, as far as jobs I have worked in the past go - working Saturday and one or two late nights a week is fine, brings in a little bit of money, lets me buy things like overpriced vegetarian burgers and CDs.
But summer, oh summer. The time when the sun is supposed to shine, sand is meant to drift unchecked over the doormats of houses over the country, pavlova with strawberries and BBQ pre-Christmas feasts are the order of the day. Meanwhile, we can only idly dream of these things while experiencing the worst of societally acceptable humanity as the horrible hideous and heinous all emerge from the woodwork to take out all their anger on salespeople.
I hate them so much. The fuckwit who invented the phrase 'the customer is always right' was obviously a corporate big-wig with no experience of the shop floor or knowledge of how people taking his obnoxious statement to heart will take this to mean that those unfortunate enough to be stuck working behind a counter, particularly in busy times when everyone is harried, don't need to be treated as legitimate people, that just because they happen to be younger and employed by the retail industry they can then be spoken to with condescending tones that no human being with an ounce of respect for others would ever dream of. I get it. You're busy. Your kids are being a pain. You wanted a discount on that, and didn't fucking bother to read the fine print so are frustrated that you can't get it. Seriously. I understand. But don't take it out on me. I'm a teenager (though thankfully nearly shot of being one). I have 'different' hair and a pierced nose. Didn't anyone ever tell you not to discriminate, bucko? Would you like it if I decided to release all my inner turmoil through means of verbal abuse directed towards grey haired middle aged self-righteous men? Because right now, it should be well within my rights to slap to sunset, with the way you're treating me - or other staff members around me. But I won't. Because I'm a Decent Human Being.
Breeeeathe.
Anyway.
That is off my chest, a little, at least.
So right now, I'm listening to The Dresden Dolls and Amanda Palmer properly for the first time in ages, and it's weird. (Not least because it doesn't exactly help alleviating other feelings that have been bringing me down the last few days - my distance from all that world, the complete aloneness I sometimes feel, because nobody here can understand it all, and everyone else is so far away - there's only so much the internet can do. I see through the eyes of several what I could be doing, where I could be if I had stayed - if I could have stayed. An 'expiry date', as someone once put it, is a terrible thing to be termed. That's another blog, though, despite the fact that was almost where this one was going to head). I'm investigating flight costs, because I apparently enjoy cruelly tempting myself. And I'm finishing sorting out my room so that I will have a proper place to write, which is, come to think of it, the main reason I started this entry.
I always have a thousand and one story ideas in my head. For novels, for short stories, for poems, songs and one line moments that could find a place anywhere but could well just be written down and pinned to my wall for a while.
Today I opened one of my writing folders I hadn't looked at for a while, and decided to look through Summertime At Tarras, which is my most 'successful' piece to date. It was published, my writing teacher and at least one notable NZ writing personality loved it, and even though much work from high school years is obviously cringe worthy, looking back on this story (I wrote it when I was sixteen, on the cusp of seventeen), I am still proud of it. And it's a setting I love, and a character who I *cough* relate to (random fact - the girl in the story is very me two and a bit years ago).
And since it's a world I've already inhabited and gone into detail with, I've decided that extending and expanding Tarras is the most realistic of all my current writing projects. Granted, it does read a bit like a girl a little obsessed with the Bill Manhire School Of Literary Awesomeness At VUW, but it was in the midst of my Emily Perkins all encompassing obsession. Cut me a little slack. So I am going to do it. I'm excited. I'll let you know how it's going.
Here it is, the supposed raw material for something more -
summertime at tarras
I
These are two girls in summer. Two girls sitting half under a scrubby gorse bush, half in the sun that breaks pink skin into blistering red, the high Otago sun that stretches to arid land from a lonely, petulant blue sky. Clare takes a raspberry, lets it melt into her tongue hanging outside her mouth, a salute to all thirty degrees that rushed outside this morning. She isn’t sure what else they are going to do today except eat raspberries and dig toes into the grey rock snot that the ladybugs are eating, but that’s okay. This is the fifth summer that Clare has come to the river, but it’s the first time Julia, her sixteen year old cousin has come too.
Clare watches longingly as the water laps around the rocks, but nobody swims in this river, apart from the summertime accidents, of course. Last year the kid from two blocks along disappeared, and although nobody really told Clare about it, she heard them, the numbers. It was always in numbers. Clare put them together, wrote them down, trying to be a detective. 1537062, (fifteen years old, three metres deep, seventy percent alcohol, .62 airgun) but it didn’t mean anything, and she didn’t find any other clues. His name was Toby - Tobias - and really, it still is. There’s still a little card in one of the lockers at school.
Julia is saying something.
Look. It’s a hawk, it’s beautiful. Clare looks up, and sure enough, drifting somewhere high in the sky is a hawk. She can’t tell what colour it is, like all the hawks she has ever seen it looks black, outlined by the sun.
We see them quite a lot out here, actually. Clare wants to impress Julia with something. The river was the same as it was yesterday, nothing new, except Julia still marvelled at it, with her words. Glorious. A representation of all that is holy in the world. Magnifique.
Extremely groovy. Julia sighs, stretching out to her feet. It’s a ridiculously beautiful day.
Yeah. Ridiculously. Clare mimicks the sigh, crosses her legs like Holly Golightly on that poster her mum has, without the cigarette. Her jandals look obscenely violet against the gravel and the sand and the golden summer-dry leaves that look like little bits of flaky pastry when she crushes them with her hands.
Shit. We have to be back in ten minutes. At four o’clock.
Okay. I know a faster way back. Clare jumps up and follows Julia back up the hill. Go that way instead of straight ahead. She makes her hands into Ls, one backwards and one not. Left.
Julia keeps kicking her feet as she walks, Clare can see the bidibids on her shoelaces and socks that she’s trying to disentangle, and feels sort of bad that she didn’t tell Julia she should wear jandals and not her sneakers. When they get back to the house, Clare pours Coke into two plastic cups for them while Julia sits on the porch wincing as she pulls them off one by one, the hooks digging into the soft fleshy pads of her fingers.
II
These are new experiences. They are going into town today, and Clare wants to show her an ice-cream parlour, a sweet shop. Julia wants non-familial human contact. In the end, Clare goes to the places she desires with her mum, while her father checks out the farming supply stores and has a beer in a pub that used to be full of poachers and sheep farmers, but now has Japanese and German tourists and property developers buying Stella Artois instead of Speights. Julia has her sights set on a little café that looks like it’s coffee might come in something other than a polystyrene cup.
This café is called Rio D, it’s in an old villa. The girl behind the counter has a tongue stud, the guy cleaning tables has dreads and the whole place smells faintly of weed. There’s only one group currently there, a band of teenagers, mostly of unidentifiable gender. They all look up for a moment when Julia walks in, then go back to their espressos and their communal slice of cake. A skinny someone with a shaggy haircut and sleepy eyes winks at her. Someone else slaps this individual (one of the unknown specimans), and another groans Theo! Julia can’t quite tell what they said, but she thinks this is it. A guy, then.
Julia orders a flat white and stirs sugar into it, avoiding slopping coffee into the saucer. She picks it up between spoonfuls and tastes it. She realises after the first two and a half packets that it’s actually some artificial sweetener crap, so abandons it all. She leaves the cup on her table, on a chequered cloth that makes her think of diners in old Hollywood movies. There’s an ant on it, but she can’t see it half the time, she waits until it hits the spotlight of white square before she can see it, flicks it away.
III
These are nights of seclusion. Of elective loneliness. Julia’s nights spent in her little room with the windows that look out to the sky and wilderness. In the mirror, her face is pale and her eyes distant. If these are the windows to the soul, they are stained glass, almost impenetrable, even to herself. There is a slight twitch in her right eyebrow, and she has written a Bob Dylan lyric on the back of her hand in black felt pen that won’t rub off yet.
It hurts her sometimes, when she’s outside, when her affectations are shown up against Nature. It could almost be cathartic, except that’s not really quite the right word. Cleansed rather than purged, by the undeniable realism of nature. Verism, she thinks. She knows her trying to be a city dwelling sophisticate is an untruth. She can’t bring herself to say lie, she prefers to call it her pseudo-bohemian-glamour.
The pictures on the wall are the same ones as the ones at the old house, back in Auckland, and Julia could swear she smells the smoke that was maybe the first connection to Aunty Christine and Uncle Aaron, even though neither of them smoke anymore. Some particular type, fully-fledged ciggies instead of the menthols and lights that her friends try to sneak at lunchtimes (Julia doesn’t really know that much about cigarettes) forming a childhood trigger scent. Maybe it seeped into the wooden frames. It’s a Christmas smell, playing on the trampoline, the best parts of summer smell, synonymous with leather couches that stick to sweaty legs, old villas, lawnmowers and loud ruddy laughter from the dads of the family who drank beer, slapped each other on the back and wore kiss the cook aprons while holding sausages with silver tongs that looked like dinosaur mouths. Julia remembers falling over in the front courtyard when the cobbles were slick with Mt Eden drizzle, and watching The Aristocats with the six of them sitting on the big bed, all the cousins, with a bright orange plaster on her knee.
IV
These are the facts. Tonight Julia must have dinner with the neighbours, who Clare whispers to her are boring as all hell.
Their daughter’s your age, Jules. Aunty Christine told her earlier, wanting to heighten the good side, she knows that Clare will tell Julia the McKinneys next door are boring, but Clare is a twelve-year-old girl with no interest in winemaking or teenage angst. The girls go to the river again.
They get back wet but dry quickly in the unforgiving sun. Julia gets changed and finds her biggest pair of sunglasses, puts them on, wishes they were heart shaped so she could look more like Lolita. Then she is vaguely disturbed by this notion, and decided on no glasses at all. Julia twirls, her skirt rising like ripples in a pool, with the dropped stone somewhere within her stomach It’s caught, wedged against folds of sweetmeat flesh, slowly worn down by acids.
V
These are fragments of memories. Julia is sitting outside, under a grape vine, eating raspberries like Amélie, one on each finger, one at a time. She remembers that part, it was one, maybe two, early afternoon.
The McKinneys arrived at six, Sylvie and Jeff.
Leona will be here soon, Chris. Sylvie is apologetic. She was out with her friends last night, you know how teenagers are. The adults all laugh, Clare scowls and Julia sits with her ankles choked by sandals she never wears. Jeff McKinney has big hands, but these hands only knew pens and keyboards until a year ago, he is newer to the biz than Christine and Aaron, and his handshake is flimsy, an accountant’s handshake. Oh, here comes Leo! Marvellous.
A lithe figure hops off the approaching quad bike and walks towards them. It’s Theo. Except it’s not, now Julia knows it’s Leo, and Leo is a girl.
Hey. Julia can see Leo recognises her, she smiles. No, she half-smiles. Only
one side, like she’s had a stroke, or something. Except teenagers can’t have strokes, can they?
The next important thing is around ten, Julia sits inside, feeling mildly inebriated. She doesn’t even like red wine, it tastes like insect repellent. But now, somehow, her glass is empty, the conversation with Leo has ceased and she needs something to do. The adults are are sitting around drinking sauvignon blanc, or pinot gris, something French, and eating cheese cubes with their fingers, and Julia can see little grease marks on the glass stems. So she’ll go find Clare.
None of them can see it, but contrary to nature’s laws, a hawk is above them, flying blind. Like every other bird unseen at night, it looks black, and when it cries softly, Julia is the only one who hears it.
VI
These are the happenings. In the dark, Clare crouches beside the river. All she does is listen to the water, it rushes around the rocks, the river level is rising, somehow. It hasn’t rained for a long time. It’s so cold, there are no clouds in the sky for insulation, and she imagines falling into the wintery water. The feeling, ice burning up her limbs, maybe it would freeze the blood in her heart. She does not want this to happen.
Julia is running through the dark, barefoot like every heroine ever was.
Clare hadn’t realised how lonely the river was. Last year, she would happily play alone in the shallows, now there is only an absence of feeling. She touches the surface of the water, it’s not as cold as she had thought. She sheds her sandals, and stands ankle deep. It’s really quite nice, she closes her eyes and it’s the middle of the day, she’s nine, and this place is hers. Stepping further, the reflections of stars dance around her shins. She is freed from all constraints, she sees her river, something else entirely from the black water curling up her legs. It doesn’t forbid anything, this river, she can do whatever she likes. She steps further, opens her eyes and is nowhere at all. The water is at her waist, the current tugs at her ankles, and her toes in the invisible sand do not anchor her very well.
Julia stands at the side of the river, she knows she is out there. She sees nothing, only hearing the rapids. She is as helpless as Clare out in the water. She reaches down, picks up a stone and tosses it in the water.
Could you hear that? Feel it?
In the water, the stone sinks slowly, and the radiating ripples are muted by the river. It makes no sound.
Nothing. Clare manages to make herself heard, but she is so cold, suddenly, so tired.
Don’t move. Julia calls, but her voice is torn away by the wind, carried downstream. Clare won’t move, she’ll stay right where she is, but she might sit down, the sand is soft under her feet.
There are voices behind Julia, footsteps. Someone is here, someone will save the day.
Clare can’t tell if the water is moving around her or she with it. Her arms are wrapped tightly around her knees, which are tucked up to her chest, and the water is a cool embrace. She closes her eyes, and will not open them yet, she is content in her own place.
It’s late. Instead of going straight inside when they’re back, she lies on her back on the verandah, and Julia thinks she can hear someone crying. But it’s far away, somewhere else, so she can forget about it until later.
Exams are over, marks aren't yet out, and I've entered the student summer stasis - aka mindless, soul-sucking working. If I could have a non retail part-time job through the university year, I would seize it in a moment. However, retail is one of few options for a nineteen year old undergrad student.
So I'm working at Whitcoulls. I have friends, seniority, knowledge of how the whole she-bang goes down. I left it for Borders this time last year, and whilst it wasn't a bad experience, when I had job offers from both places upon my return to Aotearoa shores, I went back to Whitcoulls, my safety net. I started working there at the beginning of my last year at high school, and there are currently only two part time staff members who started working there before I did (and they are two of my good friends). It's fun, mostly, as far as jobs I have worked in the past go - working Saturday and one or two late nights a week is fine, brings in a little bit of money, lets me buy things like overpriced vegetarian burgers and CDs.
But summer, oh summer. The time when the sun is supposed to shine, sand is meant to drift unchecked over the doormats of houses over the country, pavlova with strawberries and BBQ pre-Christmas feasts are the order of the day. Meanwhile, we can only idly dream of these things while experiencing the worst of societally acceptable humanity as the horrible hideous and heinous all emerge from the woodwork to take out all their anger on salespeople.
I hate them so much. The fuckwit who invented the phrase 'the customer is always right' was obviously a corporate big-wig with no experience of the shop floor or knowledge of how people taking his obnoxious statement to heart will take this to mean that those unfortunate enough to be stuck working behind a counter, particularly in busy times when everyone is harried, don't need to be treated as legitimate people, that just because they happen to be younger and employed by the retail industry they can then be spoken to with condescending tones that no human being with an ounce of respect for others would ever dream of. I get it. You're busy. Your kids are being a pain. You wanted a discount on that, and didn't fucking bother to read the fine print so are frustrated that you can't get it. Seriously. I understand. But don't take it out on me. I'm a teenager (though thankfully nearly shot of being one). I have 'different' hair and a pierced nose. Didn't anyone ever tell you not to discriminate, bucko? Would you like it if I decided to release all my inner turmoil through means of verbal abuse directed towards grey haired middle aged self-righteous men? Because right now, it should be well within my rights to slap to sunset, with the way you're treating me - or other staff members around me. But I won't. Because I'm a Decent Human Being.
Breeeeathe.
Anyway.
That is off my chest, a little, at least.
So right now, I'm listening to The Dresden Dolls and Amanda Palmer properly for the first time in ages, and it's weird. (Not least because it doesn't exactly help alleviating other feelings that have been bringing me down the last few days - my distance from all that world, the complete aloneness I sometimes feel, because nobody here can understand it all, and everyone else is so far away - there's only so much the internet can do. I see through the eyes of several what I could be doing, where I could be if I had stayed - if I could have stayed. An 'expiry date', as someone once put it, is a terrible thing to be termed. That's another blog, though, despite the fact that was almost where this one was going to head). I'm investigating flight costs, because I apparently enjoy cruelly tempting myself. And I'm finishing sorting out my room so that I will have a proper place to write, which is, come to think of it, the main reason I started this entry.
I always have a thousand and one story ideas in my head. For novels, for short stories, for poems, songs and one line moments that could find a place anywhere but could well just be written down and pinned to my wall for a while.
Today I opened one of my writing folders I hadn't looked at for a while, and decided to look through Summertime At Tarras, which is my most 'successful' piece to date. It was published, my writing teacher and at least one notable NZ writing personality loved it, and even though much work from high school years is obviously cringe worthy, looking back on this story (I wrote it when I was sixteen, on the cusp of seventeen), I am still proud of it. And it's a setting I love, and a character who I *cough* relate to (random fact - the girl in the story is very me two and a bit years ago).
And since it's a world I've already inhabited and gone into detail with, I've decided that extending and expanding Tarras is the most realistic of all my current writing projects. Granted, it does read a bit like a girl a little obsessed with the Bill Manhire School Of Literary Awesomeness At VUW, but it was in the midst of my Emily Perkins all encompassing obsession. Cut me a little slack. So I am going to do it. I'm excited. I'll let you know how it's going.
Here it is, the supposed raw material for something more -
summertime at tarras
I
These are two girls in summer. Two girls sitting half under a scrubby gorse bush, half in the sun that breaks pink skin into blistering red, the high Otago sun that stretches to arid land from a lonely, petulant blue sky. Clare takes a raspberry, lets it melt into her tongue hanging outside her mouth, a salute to all thirty degrees that rushed outside this morning. She isn’t sure what else they are going to do today except eat raspberries and dig toes into the grey rock snot that the ladybugs are eating, but that’s okay. This is the fifth summer that Clare has come to the river, but it’s the first time Julia, her sixteen year old cousin has come too.
Clare watches longingly as the water laps around the rocks, but nobody swims in this river, apart from the summertime accidents, of course. Last year the kid from two blocks along disappeared, and although nobody really told Clare about it, she heard them, the numbers. It was always in numbers. Clare put them together, wrote them down, trying to be a detective. 1537062, (fifteen years old, three metres deep, seventy percent alcohol, .62 airgun) but it didn’t mean anything, and she didn’t find any other clues. His name was Toby - Tobias - and really, it still is. There’s still a little card in one of the lockers at school.
Julia is saying something.
Look. It’s a hawk, it’s beautiful. Clare looks up, and sure enough, drifting somewhere high in the sky is a hawk. She can’t tell what colour it is, like all the hawks she has ever seen it looks black, outlined by the sun.
We see them quite a lot out here, actually. Clare wants to impress Julia with something. The river was the same as it was yesterday, nothing new, except Julia still marvelled at it, with her words. Glorious. A representation of all that is holy in the world. Magnifique.
Extremely groovy. Julia sighs, stretching out to her feet. It’s a ridiculously beautiful day.
Yeah. Ridiculously. Clare mimicks the sigh, crosses her legs like Holly Golightly on that poster her mum has, without the cigarette. Her jandals look obscenely violet against the gravel and the sand and the golden summer-dry leaves that look like little bits of flaky pastry when she crushes them with her hands.
Shit. We have to be back in ten minutes. At four o’clock.
Okay. I know a faster way back. Clare jumps up and follows Julia back up the hill. Go that way instead of straight ahead. She makes her hands into Ls, one backwards and one not. Left.
Julia keeps kicking her feet as she walks, Clare can see the bidibids on her shoelaces and socks that she’s trying to disentangle, and feels sort of bad that she didn’t tell Julia she should wear jandals and not her sneakers. When they get back to the house, Clare pours Coke into two plastic cups for them while Julia sits on the porch wincing as she pulls them off one by one, the hooks digging into the soft fleshy pads of her fingers.
II
These are new experiences. They are going into town today, and Clare wants to show her an ice-cream parlour, a sweet shop. Julia wants non-familial human contact. In the end, Clare goes to the places she desires with her mum, while her father checks out the farming supply stores and has a beer in a pub that used to be full of poachers and sheep farmers, but now has Japanese and German tourists and property developers buying Stella Artois instead of Speights. Julia has her sights set on a little café that looks like it’s coffee might come in something other than a polystyrene cup.
This café is called Rio D, it’s in an old villa. The girl behind the counter has a tongue stud, the guy cleaning tables has dreads and the whole place smells faintly of weed. There’s only one group currently there, a band of teenagers, mostly of unidentifiable gender. They all look up for a moment when Julia walks in, then go back to their espressos and their communal slice of cake. A skinny someone with a shaggy haircut and sleepy eyes winks at her. Someone else slaps this individual (one of the unknown specimans), and another groans Theo! Julia can’t quite tell what they said, but she thinks this is it. A guy, then.
Julia orders a flat white and stirs sugar into it, avoiding slopping coffee into the saucer. She picks it up between spoonfuls and tastes it. She realises after the first two and a half packets that it’s actually some artificial sweetener crap, so abandons it all. She leaves the cup on her table, on a chequered cloth that makes her think of diners in old Hollywood movies. There’s an ant on it, but she can’t see it half the time, she waits until it hits the spotlight of white square before she can see it, flicks it away.
III
These are nights of seclusion. Of elective loneliness. Julia’s nights spent in her little room with the windows that look out to the sky and wilderness. In the mirror, her face is pale and her eyes distant. If these are the windows to the soul, they are stained glass, almost impenetrable, even to herself. There is a slight twitch in her right eyebrow, and she has written a Bob Dylan lyric on the back of her hand in black felt pen that won’t rub off yet.
It hurts her sometimes, when she’s outside, when her affectations are shown up against Nature. It could almost be cathartic, except that’s not really quite the right word. Cleansed rather than purged, by the undeniable realism of nature. Verism, she thinks. She knows her trying to be a city dwelling sophisticate is an untruth. She can’t bring herself to say lie, she prefers to call it her pseudo-bohemian-glamour.
The pictures on the wall are the same ones as the ones at the old house, back in Auckland, and Julia could swear she smells the smoke that was maybe the first connection to Aunty Christine and Uncle Aaron, even though neither of them smoke anymore. Some particular type, fully-fledged ciggies instead of the menthols and lights that her friends try to sneak at lunchtimes (Julia doesn’t really know that much about cigarettes) forming a childhood trigger scent. Maybe it seeped into the wooden frames. It’s a Christmas smell, playing on the trampoline, the best parts of summer smell, synonymous with leather couches that stick to sweaty legs, old villas, lawnmowers and loud ruddy laughter from the dads of the family who drank beer, slapped each other on the back and wore kiss the cook aprons while holding sausages with silver tongs that looked like dinosaur mouths. Julia remembers falling over in the front courtyard when the cobbles were slick with Mt Eden drizzle, and watching The Aristocats with the six of them sitting on the big bed, all the cousins, with a bright orange plaster on her knee.
IV
These are the facts. Tonight Julia must have dinner with the neighbours, who Clare whispers to her are boring as all hell.
Their daughter’s your age, Jules. Aunty Christine told her earlier, wanting to heighten the good side, she knows that Clare will tell Julia the McKinneys next door are boring, but Clare is a twelve-year-old girl with no interest in winemaking or teenage angst. The girls go to the river again.
They get back wet but dry quickly in the unforgiving sun. Julia gets changed and finds her biggest pair of sunglasses, puts them on, wishes they were heart shaped so she could look more like Lolita. Then she is vaguely disturbed by this notion, and decided on no glasses at all. Julia twirls, her skirt rising like ripples in a pool, with the dropped stone somewhere within her stomach It’s caught, wedged against folds of sweetmeat flesh, slowly worn down by acids.
V
These are fragments of memories. Julia is sitting outside, under a grape vine, eating raspberries like Amélie, one on each finger, one at a time. She remembers that part, it was one, maybe two, early afternoon.
The McKinneys arrived at six, Sylvie and Jeff.
Leona will be here soon, Chris. Sylvie is apologetic. She was out with her friends last night, you know how teenagers are. The adults all laugh, Clare scowls and Julia sits with her ankles choked by sandals she never wears. Jeff McKinney has big hands, but these hands only knew pens and keyboards until a year ago, he is newer to the biz than Christine and Aaron, and his handshake is flimsy, an accountant’s handshake. Oh, here comes Leo! Marvellous.
A lithe figure hops off the approaching quad bike and walks towards them. It’s Theo. Except it’s not, now Julia knows it’s Leo, and Leo is a girl.
Hey. Julia can see Leo recognises her, she smiles. No, she half-smiles. Only
one side, like she’s had a stroke, or something. Except teenagers can’t have strokes, can they?
The next important thing is around ten, Julia sits inside, feeling mildly inebriated. She doesn’t even like red wine, it tastes like insect repellent. But now, somehow, her glass is empty, the conversation with Leo has ceased and she needs something to do. The adults are are sitting around drinking sauvignon blanc, or pinot gris, something French, and eating cheese cubes with their fingers, and Julia can see little grease marks on the glass stems. So she’ll go find Clare.
None of them can see it, but contrary to nature’s laws, a hawk is above them, flying blind. Like every other bird unseen at night, it looks black, and when it cries softly, Julia is the only one who hears it.
VI
These are the happenings. In the dark, Clare crouches beside the river. All she does is listen to the water, it rushes around the rocks, the river level is rising, somehow. It hasn’t rained for a long time. It’s so cold, there are no clouds in the sky for insulation, and she imagines falling into the wintery water. The feeling, ice burning up her limbs, maybe it would freeze the blood in her heart. She does not want this to happen.
Julia is running through the dark, barefoot like every heroine ever was.
Clare hadn’t realised how lonely the river was. Last year, she would happily play alone in the shallows, now there is only an absence of feeling. She touches the surface of the water, it’s not as cold as she had thought. She sheds her sandals, and stands ankle deep. It’s really quite nice, she closes her eyes and it’s the middle of the day, she’s nine, and this place is hers. Stepping further, the reflections of stars dance around her shins. She is freed from all constraints, she sees her river, something else entirely from the black water curling up her legs. It doesn’t forbid anything, this river, she can do whatever she likes. She steps further, opens her eyes and is nowhere at all. The water is at her waist, the current tugs at her ankles, and her toes in the invisible sand do not anchor her very well.
Julia stands at the side of the river, she knows she is out there. She sees nothing, only hearing the rapids. She is as helpless as Clare out in the water. She reaches down, picks up a stone and tosses it in the water.
Could you hear that? Feel it?
In the water, the stone sinks slowly, and the radiating ripples are muted by the river. It makes no sound.
Nothing. Clare manages to make herself heard, but she is so cold, suddenly, so tired.
Don’t move. Julia calls, but her voice is torn away by the wind, carried downstream. Clare won’t move, she’ll stay right where she is, but she might sit down, the sand is soft under her feet.
There are voices behind Julia, footsteps. Someone is here, someone will save the day.
Clare can’t tell if the water is moving around her or she with it. Her arms are wrapped tightly around her knees, which are tucked up to her chest, and the water is a cool embrace. She closes her eyes, and will not open them yet, she is content in her own place.
It’s late. Instead of going straight inside when they’re back, she lies on her back on the verandah, and Julia thinks she can hear someone crying. But it’s far away, somewhere else, so she can forget about it until later.