words and ukulele

untitled late night poem

how is that every time i start to write with an intent to write
i start to
word
by 
word

forget.

i will type, i will write on yellowed notebook page
i will scrawl into the very earth

but no matter where i write it will stop
hiccups
one word a minute
i would fail as a secretary.

the only stories i finish
are haikus
written in condensation on my bathroom mirror

they fade away leaving no words
but there are finger smudges in the morning

i know they were there
but i can no longer tell
what the poem says.

old poetry - ‘petra’

petra

She came in the summer.
The one when Christina turned
Sixteen, and we thought
We had grown up.
When we ate strawberries
Behind the boatshed, listening
To Siouxsie Sioux.
We called it ‘old wave’.

The sky is a petulant blue
cloudless, unforgiving
like us, and clarity
like silver tongues
and lennon/mccartney songs
seems to exist
for a moment.

petra, she says, without
the hellenic splendour
we were accustomed to.
she sits beneath
an andy warhol print, campbell’s soup
but instead of pop art
she is byzantine, lenten and loveless
with eyes flat as unlevened bread.

(another throwback to my creative writing with Mrs Ali, aged 16 days… I kind of like it. I’ve lost track of most of my poetry from my portfolio that year, but this one still hangs around. you may or may not have noticed that there’s a line from ‘summertime at tarras’ in here, ‘the sky is a petulant blue’, because 16 year old I WANT TO BE A WRITER Briar thought it was awesome and was very proud of it. I’m more ambivalent now, but hey)

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.

1 note

Singing The Frangipani Blues

‘She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere.
So I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair.’

‘Norwegian Wood’ Tuesday. There’s a song for every occasion, and today Paul McCartney is in her ear. Mish holds a firm belief that some higher power controls the shuffle option on her iPod.

As she does every other day, Mish walks past the block of corner shops on her way from the bus stop to her father’s work. Headphones firmly in ears, focus straight ahead. She’s come to realise that her pressed blazer and tartan uniform do not command respect from these girls who loiter outside the dairy every afternoon. That to them her skin, which her mother calls olive and her sister calls depressingly tanned, is white.

***

‘If you think that a kiss is all in the lips, come on, you got it all wrong, man.’

This week, Paul McCartney’s elsewhere and Mish returns to the present with The White Stripes, one of few ‘current’ bands she volunteers to listen to.

She laughs to herself as she ponders the deep meaning of such lyrics.

“What’re you looking at, bitch?”

Mish is a meerkat, scared and frozen. She doesn’t dare turn, instead trying to ignore it, this failing of her mental barriers that is making her want to cry. She picks up her pace and sets her expression to blank.

“Yeah, that’s right, just walk off, ya rich bitch.”

***

‘Excuse me. But I just have to explode this body.’

Mish does not let her mind wander. Today, her one goal is to get to her father’s work as quickly as possible. She is only dimly aware of the irony that she is practically jumping out of her skin as she walks to the rhythm of this Bjork euro-techno-arthouse-whatever-pop. As she stuggles along, toting heavy backpack and clarinet case, she can hear the girls’ laughter above her music, but she can’t turn it up any further.

***

‘All around me are familiar faces, worn out places, worn out faces.’

Mish catches herself, as she descends the bus stairs, contemplating the fact that it’s the Tears For Fears original, not the melancholy Gary Jules version everyone knows, that she’s listening to. It’s a happy-suicidal, kamikaze-fairground-ride kind of song, 80s pop vocals and echoes of Caribbean intrumentals - ‘I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad that these dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.’

Contemplation pre-occupies her and Mish finds herself already at her father’s work and climbing into his car.

“So how was your day, Michelle?” he asks her, expected paternal duty.    
“Okay. Fine.” Mish also knows what is expected of her, as she slips into her at-home surly teenager monosyllabic dialect.    
“Excellent,” he says. “So how was French? Maths?”    
“I hate calculus - where are you going?” she yelps as he banks a hard left into a side street.   
“I thought I’d get us some takeaways. Like the old days.” The old days? Mish thinks, the epitome of self-righteous teenagers. Isn’t the point that we’ve moved on from the past? But she manages to keep her mind and mouth separate.    
“Okay. Cool.”

They pull into a parking space right outside the dairy, and her father makes his way off to the Chinese takeaway shop, leaving Mish alone and vulnerable. The girls are still sitting on the kerb, but this is the first time she’s dared look at them. There are three of them, two in short school uniforms and long white socks. The third girl wears a faded silver puffer jacket and a fake Von Dutch baseball cap. Mish thinks she can see a hole in the sleeve of her jacket, and there’s a black mark on the hood. It’s this girl who sees Mish looking, this girl who gives her the finger.

She looks away, embarrassed, but Mish (poetically, she likes to think) realises, in this moment, that she must seem to have come from across the seas to steal their land from them - she is a foreigner trespassing. She knows that they have no way of knowing it, of realising that once this was her neighbourhood too.  Or that their puffer jacket-ed leader once played in a kindy sandpit with her, and talked about their dolls and what they wanted for dessert. And Mish would wave goodbye as her playmate was bundled home by her Aunty Tulia, who wore bright floral dresses everyday and who gave all the girls a piece of mango and a pinch on the cheek and who Mish wished would take her home, too.

Mish finds herself yearning for those days back, when the only colour difference she noticed was ‘Aunty’ Tulia’s dress for the day, and how drab the grey, beige and black business suits her parents wore were.

When she looks up, the girls are walking away, and her father is returning with a bag of chicken chow-mein and spring rolls.  
“Why so glum, chum?” he asks as he opens the car door and hands her the plastic bag stash.
Mish switches back to selfish sixteen year old mode. “Glum is such an old person  word,” she says with a smile tugging at her lips.   
“Well you know me, I belong in a museum.”
There’s silence. “Did you see that girl there, dad?”   
“Those girls? They’re always hanging around. That tall one in the jacket is Tina Fa’afoi. I don’t suppose you remember her, but she went to kindy with you.” 
“Really?” Mish asks, carefully, as around a crystal display.    
“Yeah. And her brother, Robert, too. Their dad’s in one of the gangs round here, he’s been in and out of prison since they were about three. Come to think of it, I think Rob is too, now.”

Mish looks out to the departing silver jacket, as they pull away, and it’s slouching, stone-kicking, swearing owner. Broken flowers, fallen petals, a hibiscus closed through an unseasonably long winter.
The girl, Tina, is an unknown now, but Mish can’t differentiate between the small, pigtailed, dungarees-wearing child with a gap-toothed grin (who helped her make a fortress in the sandpit) and this young woman.
I can’t do anything. So, because it’s all she can do, Mish hides behind her music.
What do the higher powers have to tell me today?

***

‘My baby loves me - I’m so happy. Happy makes me a modern girl… My whole life is like a picture of a sunny day.’

Liar.

The higher powers have left Mish to her devices now, she’s on her own to fix this world of hers.
The car pulls out onto the main road, and Mish lets Sleater-Kinney lull her to a cheek-on-the-window sleep.
It’s been a very stressful day.

a slew of stories

I’ve decided to post a few different stories at once, and I may as well post the back story for each of them here. In chronological order, because some are a little on the old side… (and it is pure coincidence that they all start with the letter ‘S’, by the way)

Singing The Frangipani Blues

This story was written for a creative writing internal assessment when I was in Year 12 - that’s 11th grade for you North American types - and therefore I was either 15 or just 16 when I wrote it. It’s based on true incidents, although with creative flair added as well. I thought I was so fucking cool with my lyrical introductions for each passage. It’s short and sweet and not my best ever work but it does resonate with me because it is fairly true to life. Names, of course are altered.

I also was in love with my title, and my English teacher, the FABULOUS Mrs Ali (who, incidentally, is pretty much the highest authority in terms of high school creative writing) was a fan of it too - to the extent that after the single teacher lookover we were allowed, which was meant to only provide us with technical feedback, she pulled me aside and said ‘I’m not supposed to say this but I love your title.

Summertime At Tarras

‘Tarras’ is my most successful piece to date, I feel. In 2007 it won second place in the high school division of a nationwide short story competition and subsequently was published in the Sunday Star Times, a nationally circulated newspaper in NZ. I’m pretty proud of that - it was a big deal, the prime minister was at the awards ceremony and my favourite NZ author, Emily Perkins, was the MC.

This story is odd. The setting is very much taken from real life, and the character of Julia is ‘me’, in effect, and ‘Clare’ is my younger cousin. But the story itself is entirely fiction. Just so you know, and don’t start getting concerned. I do draw from my experiences and surroundings a lot, but they aren’t the be all and end all of my creative work.