Selma In The City

Gemma tagged me last week (or was it longer than that, sorry Gemma, I’ve lost track of time) for this fun meme.

Rules:
The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
Each player answers the questions about himself or herself.
At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Here we go……

What were you doing ten years ago today?

Ah, that would be May 1998. I remember it distinctly. My son was almost two and we were talking about trying for another child. But I was admitted to hospital with severe bleeding and had to have what they call an endometrial ablation. The doctors wanted to perform a full hysterectomy but I was terrified of the side-effects and of dying on the operating table(one of my greatest fears/phobias) so I refused. I was told at that point that I would never be able to have any more children which devastated me at the time because I had been dreaming of having a little golden-haired daughter. Real dreams, almost every night. It took me a few years to come to terms with it because the dream had been so vivid. Then a really odd thing happened. My sister, Shelley had a baby girl who looked just like the little girl in my dream. I don’t know why, but I was finally able to put my disappointment at not bringing another child into the world to rest. That little girl in my dream had come into this world another way. When I met my niece for the first time she looked at me as if to say: ‘I know you.’ It was uncanny.

5 things on today’s ‘to do’ list -

Finish the next chapter of my book about the homeless girl

Get through a day of work without plotting to make a pair of cement shoes for my boss

Visit all the blogs I love to read

Make chocolate banana bread as a little end of the week treat

Spend the evening watching the DVD of Atonement I got for my birthday. Can it possibly be as good as the book? I mean, in my eyes Ian McEwan is a god!

5 Things I’d Do If I Was A Billionaire -

Buy a house

Leave a little aside for a rainy day

Set up my own publishing/film production company and give deals to all the great writers I know who are constantly rejected by the mainstream publishers

Give at least ten million to all my favourite charities

Distribute the rest of the money among my family and friends. No point in keeping it all to yourself, is there? So I probably wouldn’t be a billionaire for long. Then I’d get a T-shirt made that said : ‘I used to be a billionaire but now I’m happy.’

5 bad habits -

what, only five?

Leaving books all over the place (I read a few things at once)

Not always being able to say NO straight away even if I really want to

Letting depression de-motivate me

Fearing success (I think that’s why I have so many unfinished writing projects. I don’t fear rejection, I fear success. Sounds odd, I know, but I am used to being rejected. Success would mean looking differently at the way I view myself)

Jumping to conclusions and overreacting

5 places I’ve lived -

Glasgow, Scotland

Donegal, Ireland

Italy (for a year as a backpacker)

Sydney, Australia

In my head on Introspection Street (yeah, I used to be a Goth)

5 jobs I’ve had -

Teacher

Editor

Waitress

Gardener

Fiction buyer in a bookshop

So, that’s it. Thanks, Gemma, that was fun.

I’m not going to tag anyone but if you feel so inclined, please feel free to indulge.

*************************************************************************************

Please spare a thought or a prayer over the next few days and weeks for the people of Parkersburg, Iowa, who have been badly affected by a tornado. Dear blogging friends of mine - Britt and her Mum - are in the midst of the devastation right now.

I am so sorry, dear ones. What an awful thing to go through. I am thinking of you and praying for you every day.

I haven’t posted for a few days, have missed my Writer’s Island and Slice Of Life prompts for the week, and have pondered running away and joining the French Foreign Legion, for two not exactly dissimilar reasons. Snot and vomit.

There is a cold/ tummy bug thing going around the school and because all of the parents at my son’s school are working and never keep their kids home from school when they’re sick, sending them instead doped up on paracetamol and Vick’s vaporub, the bug spreads like wildfire and without fail, because that’s just the way it goes, my son always catches it. Spectactularly. Some kind of evil-protoplasm-covering- the- carpet (vomit,) playing -with- his- friend -the- tissue- monster(snot,) spectacular.

Many of my friends and I work part-time. I was speaking to my friend, Rachel, today, whose daughter is home from school with the same illness and we bemoaned the fact that the kids always fall sick on the days we do work, not on the days we don’t. It’s a Murphy’s Law kind of thing.

So far this week she has lost two days pay while I have lost one. Many part-timers in Australia don’t get sick leave due to our former Prime Minister John Howard’s intractable, inflexible, keep- the- serfs in- their- place -innovation - the enterprise agreement. My enterprise agreement has such attractive, enlightened conditions as no paid sick leave, no holiday pay and no paid lunch break. Rachel has the added bonus of the management retaining the right to cut her hours without notice (she works in retail. If it’s quiet she gets sent home even though she will have made child care arrangements and payments for the day.)

So both of us had to do the thing we hate today because we can’t afford to lose another day’s pay and we know our kids won’t be well enough to go to school tomorrow. We had to ask our self-employed, my-job-is-more-important-than-yours husbands to take the day off and look after the kids.

We both dread asking because, didn’t you know, didn’t you hear? Our respective husband’s businesses will collapse and crumble into dust if they take six hours off. In fact, the entire Australian economy might grind to a halt without them at the helm for half a day.

But I dared Rachel and she double dared me, and together, we summoned the courage to ask the unaskable, and to our surprise, there was less huffing and puffing about it than we had expected.

So despite the fact that my favourite purple house socks are encrusted with two day old vomit and I have to go to work tomorrow with Margot the Impaler, I feel happy, because to me, part of being married is the ability to work in a team when it comes to parenting, and sometimes that teamwork involves taking a day off to care for your sick child, even if you are the father.

I mentioned in a previous post that my friend, Andie, had passed away from breast cancer, leaving behind two children. Her ten-year old daughter was ill on the weekend with a sore throat and Andie’s husband rang me in a panic to find out if I knew how to make Andie’s lemon soother drink. Lizzie wouldn’t settle without it and was kicking up a fuss. He was distraught, so I immediately drove over with lemons, honey, ginger and on the off chance that Lizzie liked the same type of drink as my son - lemonade.

Thankfully, I was right. Lizzie was pleased with hot lemonade with a teaspoon of honey and a tiny twist of fresh lemon. She sipped it in her Sailor Moon mug with tears in her eyes. ‘Daddy doesn’t know how to do anything,’ she said. ‘He can’t even iron my school skirts properly. I want Mummy back but I know she can’t come back. She used to read me stories when I was sick. Now Daddy does but he doesn’t do the voices. I liked Mummy doing the voices. She used to call me Chick. She used to say ‘What’s happening, Chick?’ Now no one calls me Chick. Do you remember when she used to call me Chick?’

I remembered. Andie called all the women she knew Chick, all the girls too. It was her thing the way some people use Honey or Sweetie. A term of endearment. I can’t tell you how sad I felt thinking that dear little Lizzie would not hear her mother calling her Chick again. Ever.

Andie’s husband was sitting at the kitchen table when Lizzie finally dropped off to sleep. Slumped, defeated.’ This is the hard part,’ he said. ‘ The every day stuff that I don’t know like how Lizzie is supposed to take her trumpet to school on Tuesdays and that she starts at 8.30 instead of 9AM on that day, and that she likes little notes in her lunchbox and a dollar on Fridays to buy popcorn from the school canteen. Andie did so much with the kids and she never wrote it down. There is so much I don’t know. I feel so guilty like I’ve been an absent father for years but all I was guilty of was working and providing a good life for my family. Lizzie was in tears the other day because I wouldn’t let her feed a pigeon that came into the garden. Apparently Andie had let her feed it. They had called it Kenny. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.’

It’s the everyday reminders of what the person we have lost was which colour our grief. What they knew. What they did. What they were. How they interacted with others in a way only they could. It’s the little things that are hardest to get over - the way sandwiches were made, or coffee was prepared, or that song that was always turned up when it came on the radio and danced to in the kitchen. It’s the little things that were real. And just as they make it difficult for us to forget, they can also help us to remember. And as sorrow eases with time, to remember can be a comfort. I hope that one day Lizzie finds comfort in remembering the woman who used to call her Chick.

Occasionally my anaemic state catches up with me and energy is in short supply. It’s a bit of a crash and burn situation.

It hit me during the latter half of this week. Feet-dragging, neck-lolling, frayed nerve-ends exhaustion. My doctor has been on at me for years to manage my time better. I tend to be one of those gung ho, in boots and all kind of people with little regard for how much sleep I’m getting or whether I’m eating properly. It is not a good idea to go, go ,go when one’s normal energy levels shatter at the smallest jolt.

Towards the end of the week I could feel the familiar haze descending; the lassitude, the sense of pointlessness, and the stubborn resistance of my mind telling my body to keep on going. No matter what. But the body wouldn’t oblige.

All I wanted to do in the evenings was sleep. No reading. No TV. No blogging. Sometimes that’s the way it works. There is a shutting down of sorts. Sometimes too much effort is required for everything.

I tried to motivate myself today by going for a walk. I stood at a point overlooking the harbour where there is a wrought-iron fence you can link your fingers through. I stand there often, pretending I’m a princess at the entrance to a castle, looking out at the world but unable to participate because my father refuses to let me leave the castle so that my position behind the fence is a kind of prison. Just as fatigue is.

But you gotta respect fatigue. All that spirit is willing but the flesh is weak stuff has a ring of truth to it. It’s a busy, busy world we live in. There is always something to do, people to see, places to go, blogs to visit. Fatigue knows what it’s talking about. It is the motherly type, shaking its finger at those who disregard the signs it throws in our path.

The fence left a gritty sheen on my fingers, smelling metallic as blood. A young man, dressed entirely in white called to me as I gazed out to sea, indicating the stairs leading to the road. He must have thought I was a tourist, he must have thought that if he didn’t call out to me I would stay, stranded forever behind that fence. He must have thought that I thought use of the stairs was forbidden.

So I walked down those stairs, black-tinged sandstone with lines of moss at the edges, throwing out my arms as I reached the bottom as a child does when they cross the finishing line in a race. There was a chill wind coming in from the bay but there was the clean touch of triumph in the air.

I saw the young man look back and I indicated my descent with a flourish. He adjusted his collar, laughing to himself, his white clothes billowing like sails. I took my eyes off him for a moment as a boat sounded its horn, and when I looked back, he was gone.

Happy, I walked back up the stairs and headed for home. My fatigue for the moment, forgotten, blown apart unexpectedly by the white-clothed stranger. All I could think of as I headed for home was something my son always says when the daily routine has been abandoned:

‘Normal service will resume shortly.’

And with fatigue currently at bay, I know it will.

It’s Writers Island time again.

The prompt this week is impulse.

Here’s my story -

The trees edged the street, leaning forward like old ladies looking into a pram. It was a fortress of leaves, a clutch of branches that cast a watery green light onto the road. Rae stood at the front of the house, feeling the cool breeze at the nape of her neck, enthralled with a sense of liberty.

This time she had been held hostage for two days. Locked in that windowless, silent space where everything was black. Bound with rope and thick tape so that she could only move one foot a fraction, couldn’t even flex her fingers or incline her head until the pain, tears and frustration grew beyond lament.

It was her fault. So he said. That man. Her husband. She hated him so much now that she couldn’t even utter his name without a murderous rage descending. Yes it was her fault, she had forgotten that he wanted fresh peas for dinner, not frozen. How dare she have the audacity to serve him frozen.

It started with taunting, name calling, hitting her on the body where no one could see. Where Rae couldn’t see if she forgot to look. Her clothes covered the bruises but not the pain. Sometimes it was so bad she had to lean forward when she walked, clutching the sides of buildings for support. People made comments on her health, her colouring – white tinged with blue. She knew what they meant, she could see it when she looked out into the world, like a grey gauze was pinned to her eyes.

After several months when he realised she would not cower before him, he began to lock her in the room. At first she screamed, kicking the door until her feet grew numb, and she trembled as if sick with fever. Then she accepted it, not fighting, embracing instead the sense of regret that she had ever married him at all, as a way of facing her prison.

With acceptance of the quiet, the dark, came reverie. And something else, a change, a departure, an impulse burnished with jeopardy.

It started with a fluttering around her feet, difficult and restless. It was cold and unsettling. Once she had walked along the beach and had seen blood on the sand. She thought it might have belonged to a bird that had damaged its wings on the rocks or the cliffs above, but there were no feathers or little foot marks. It bothered her for weeks, that blood, turning dark red in the wind. She scoured the papers for evidence of foul play but found none. Over time the image of the blood faded but the feeling arising from it remained, mottled with dread, stronger than ever in her confined prison.

After the fluttering came an energy, rushing upward, pinpricks by the thousand, seeking her breath, her bone, her surrender. She was tied up, bound. She had to be free. The energy bounced against the walls where she was jammed, crammed in like a toy in a basket. She thought of, dreamed of, wanted to be free. And the doorhandle began to turn.

She thought he was back, either to release her or taunt her some more, but nothing happened. She held her breath, counting to one hundred, forcing her breathing to slow, and then the doorhandle turned once more.

The door burst open and she fell into the hallway. She struggled, wanting, dreaming, thinking of her bonds being broken and they fell away like torn paper chains.

She stumbled to the living room. The television was blaring. He sat there, the man she couldn’t name, staring glassy-eyed at the screen. He was drinking beer at two in the morning, dropping the smooth green bottle onto the rug when he saw her. She watched, fascinated as the beer spread in a plume, foam flecked just like a wave.

‘How the hell did you get out?’ he asked. He fumbled in his pocket and held up a key. ‘How the hell did you get out?’ he asked again.

‘I won’t be locked in there again,’ Rae said. ‘I am not yours to do with as you please.’
His response was less strident than she expected.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll see.’

The next few weeks were full of exultation. Rae sang, smiled, swayed with purpose. The energy surrounding her was incessant, vehement, making her feel like she was standing directly in a headwind. At first she resisted the impulse to do more, to make things move of their own accord, but soon she couldn’t help herself.

She drew books from shelves, glasses from cupboards, opened curtains with a single thought. If the day grew cold she thought of a blanket emerging from the linen press, or a thick pair of socks, and they appeared as if blown there by the wind.

She was delighted, enthralled, white-faced with apprehension at her new power. She felt she had entered a world only dreamed of in stories.

He had to spoil it. As she knew he would. Rae had let the milk run out. And the bread. It meant no toast for his breakfast in the morning. And his tea. How he hated no milk for his tea.

He came at her, roaring. Bending her neck like a sapling, filling her with a rush of despair. ‘You will be punished,’ he shouted, pulling out the cords for binding. She was surprised, shocked that he kept them in his pocket.

‘No,’ she screamed. ’ Never again.’

She managed to break away from him, fleeing to the garden, running out into the street and down the hill to the cliffs. He followed, hollering, filling the air with terror.

Rae stopped when she reached the cliffs, feeling the creaking basalt beneath her feet. It was a long way down. People always said that when standing at a great height, almost churlish at stating the obvious: It’s a long way down.

Tell me something I don’t know, Rae thought.

The waves collided with the rocks. The sea was gleaming, stars glittered on its surface, a black, glossy mirror.

He was beside her, eyes red, nose streaming with the touch of the night. ‘You will go home right now,’ he said. ‘You will get in the closet and stay there until I tell you to come out.’

‘No,’ Rae said.’ You will not tell me what to do anymore.’

She felt the pinpricks start once more at her feet, He moved towards her. She felt the impulse rise. She thought of rocks breaking away at his feet, falling into the gaping maw of the sea. The rocks fell. He fell, blinking and clutching at the air, stunned into silence.

In the morning she saw him, stranded on the rocks. His head on the sand, oozing blood like a plum split open by a bird. The blood had blackened in parts, thick as paint, the heat of it vanished like smoke.

Rae stood as the gulls circled, as the early morning fishing boats sounded their horns, straining for a sense of dismay but finding she was unashamed. Slowly, like a child wading through water, she turned away from the horizon and walked home. She didn’t look back.