The Cry Of The Banshee

One of the prompts from Cricket’s Slice Of Life this week is family superstitions.

The Irish side of my family are a very superstitious lot.

Image : Banshee by Traumknabe from Deviant Art

In traditional folklore the banshee was a woman of the fairy who possibly was an ancestral spirit appointed to forewarn members of a family of their time of death. My grandmother, all her sisters and brothers, and my great grandmother and all her family, believed the banshees walked on dark and moonless nights, searching endlessly for the next human soul to pass into the afterlife. They locked all their doors and windows and stayed indoors on such nights.

Great Gran Min called the banshee the White Lady of Sorrow. She wore a long, white winding sheet, had long, pale hair which she tidied with a silver comb, and sometimes rode a white horse. Her wail was so piercing it could shatter glass.

It is said that the cry of a banshee foretold the death of Great Gran Min’s father, Seamus McGonagle.

It was midwinter. In the sky ten thousand shadows blocked the light of the moon. It was so dark the nightbirds fluttered nervously in the trees. A wind, a lament, rose from the winter sea, spiralling upward to the hills.

The wind became a wail, touching everything, the air was alive with mournfulness. The banshee paced the fields surrounding Seamus McGonagle’s house, her long, silver hair sweeping the ground like a cloak; the white, gauzy sheet she wore, bright in the darkness.

All night long she cried. All night long the inhabitants of the house cowered in their beds. A shudder passed into the house, a trembling greater than terror.

In the morning Seamus McGonagle’s bedroom floor was grimy with broken glass. His window stood wide open and shattered, looking out to the hills. In the morning, Seamus McGonagle was dead.

This story has always filled me with an unspeakable fear. Logically, I am forced to question the very existence of the banshee, but on dark, moonless nights, I wonder……

She Came In Through The Bathroom Window

One of the prompts from Cricket’s Slice Of Life this week is jealousy.

Reminded me of a time in my life when the green-eyed monster reared its ugly head on a regular basis.

Her name was Lisa Marshall. We were both 16 and she was head of the most popular clique at school. I was one of those kids who tried to outrun the cliques by not allowing myself to be categorised. I had friends from all the cliques – the Geeks, the Nerds, the Jocks, the A-listers, the B-listers in an attempt to remain as broad-minded as possible but it became difficult with Lisa Marshall at my heels, not to become pigeon-holed.

Lisa had everything. She was the first person I knew who got dropped off at school in a Mercedes. This was in Sydney in the late 1970s in the suburbs where everyone drove Aussie cars like Chargers and Toranas. That car immediately provided her with a mystique the rest of us couldn’t hope to attain. As well as the fact her father was a doctor with his own practice and her mother was a model on a gameshow.

Lisa was pretty in a blonde, sun-kissed, soft-pink lip gloss way. She had a Farrah Fawcett haircut and a silver choker with her name on it. She had a tan year round (in the days before tanning salons) and wore real French perfume which she dabbed on her wrists ceremoniously at lunchtime.

It all began with a swimming race. I made the swim team by beating Lisa’s time on the hundred metres freestyle – a record that hadn’t been beaten for four years. It was a complete fluke because normally I am not that fast but I went for it because if I made the team I wouldn’t need to do double maths on Wednesday afternoon. When the rest of the team found out I had beaten her time there was silence. Not one of them looked me in the eye. The coach was excited and slightly petulant that it had taken me four years to try out for the team. He thought he had a new swim star. What he didn’t know was that I could outswim Aquaman if it meant missing double maths.

It didn’t take long for Lisa’s barrage of assaults to begin. In one week we had three swimming carnivals. As Captain of the team it was up to her to decide who raced and who sat on the bench. I spent carnival after carnival sitting on the bench. She also began to pick on me and my friends – the usual stuff, snide comments, stealing things from our desks, spreading rumours, setting us up to look like fools. She got away with these things with ease. As people sniggered at us her popularity grew and my resentment of her increased.

A campaign began for the position of School Captain for the following year. One girl. One boy. Scott Peterson, the all round nice guy and crowd pleaser was elected as the male Captain and predictably, Lisa was elected as the female Captain, beating me by a mere 25 votes, votes she had gained by crossing the palms of people who I thought were my friends with silver. The silver in this case was a promise of an invite to her end of year party, the glory and ostentation of which had become school legend. I was peeved. There were only so many times I could smile and nod, teeth clenched when someone said:’Isn’t it great about Lisa?’ I was annoyed. I was jealous.

The year continued. Lisa carried on with her run as golden girl in full technicolour, leaving a throng of casualties in her wake. I was drowning in self-pity, devalued, dizzy with wishing for things that could never be.

Lisa’s end of year party came round. Everyone was invited except for me, Mel and our buddy Indigo who had made a point of standing up to Lisa several times. Even our friend Jules went to the party, much to our disgust. Mel lived across the road from Lisa so we sat on Mel’s balcony eating pizza and picking the party to bits, out of sorts and jealous of everyone who stepped through Lisa’s front door. I remember feeling particularly annoyed for Mel because she and Lisa used to be friends. They had known each other since they were two and used to dress up as ballerinas and dance on the lawn.

For weeks afterwards people raved about Lisa’s party. Cool. Brilliant. Amazing and one hundred other adjectives filled the air, falling around our heads like flecks of torn paper. Some people were apologetic that they had gone to the party and we hadn’t, others treated us like the losers we thought we were.

Then one day everything changed. Mel and I were smoking menthol cigarettes in the girls bathroom, (well, Mel was smoking while I kept watch) the rarely used one that looked over the sports fields, when Lisa climbed in through the window near the sinks.

‘I thought you two were in here,’ she said. ‘I need your help.’
‘You need our help,’ said Mel. ‘You with your four hundred thousand friends. Little Miss Popularity. Why the hell do you need our help? And why should we even considering helping you after everything you’ve done to us?’
‘Because I’m in trouble. Big trouble. And I know you two. You’re kind and you sort things out for people. And I thought that maybe you might sort things out for me.’ She began to cry.
Mel began to get mad. ‘This is some kind of ruse, isn’t it? Another one of your sick jokes to makes us look ridiculous. Well, you can forget it. We’re not going to fall for it.’

Lisa continued to cry.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘I think I might be pregnant,’ she said.
‘A bitch and a slut to boot,’ Mel said. ‘Who’s the father – Scott Peterson?’
‘A friend of my father’s. Edward. He’s 45.’
‘Did he rape you?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Lisa said. ‘But I was fooling around. Flirting. I could see it was affecting him and I knew I should have stopped but I couldn’t. So I had to give him what he wanted. Just like all the others.’
‘How many others have there been?’ Mel was rolling her eyes.
‘I don’t mean other men,’ Lisa said. ‘I mean all the kids at school. I have to give them what they want on a regular basis. The taunts, the belittling, the cruelty. They’ve come to expect it of me. And if I don’t deliver who knows what they might think of me.’
‘If you don’t deliver they might actually think you’re human,’ Mel said.

‘I need you to buy me a pregnancy test,’ Lisa said. ‘I can’t do it. Someone will tell my mother if they see me. I’ll never hear the end of it. Please help me.’

‘OK, I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘Meet us at Mel’s place after school.’

The test was negative. Lisa cried for half an hour in great, choking sobs. At the end of it she hugged us both, tightly, the way people do who are never going to see each other again. Then she left. We had one year left of school, a long year, a tough year, during which she didn’t speak to us at all. Not once. But she left us alone. She was kinder to people. Thoughtful. She raised money for children in Africa and for abandoned dogs. It was as if she had actually become human. Her attitude towards us changed, just like that. Overnight the tormenting and the ridiculing stopped. And so did the jealousy, dissolving quickly until we could hardly recall it ever being there at all.

Bondi Road.

One of the prompts from Cricket’s Slice Of Life this week is first apartment.

This prompt brought back so many memories.

I was 18 when I moved into my first apartment. Mel and I were first year University students, fresh from school, girls from the burbs, thrust head on into the colourful, lively, sometimes seedy world of Bondi. We lived on Bondi Rd, the street that leads down to perhaps one of Sydney’s most famous beaches – Bondi Beach – before Bondi became fashionable.

In those days Bondi was a town high on a thriving music and arts scene, high on the surf culture, high on life. We lived in a tiny two-bedder above Rosa’s Trattoria. As well as owning the restaurant Rosa – a beaming, motherly woman who taught us that there were more types of pasta than spaghetti and macaroni – owned our apartment. She insisted on giving us jobs as waitresses –

“So I can keep an eye on you. Your mothers will thank me.”

So we went to University during the day and worked at Rosa’s at night. Serving steaming plates of cannelloni, ravioli and gnocchi with spinach and bacon; and mountains of garlic bread. Dario, Rosa’s son fancied himself as a bit of a singer and every night he would regale the crowd with O Sole Mio and Santa Lucia. Mel and I have heard those songs so many times that we can still sing them word for word today. In perfect Italian.

Our apartment was tiny but very clean with a huge gas oven that was previously the main oven in the restaurant kitchen. It was temperamental – you had to jiggle the knobs before you turned it on – and it dwarfed the kitchen, but we loved it. Sometimes when Rosa had a rush on, she would commandeer it to make her secret pasta sauce, and we would come home from Uni to find four or five stainless steel pots bubbling on the stove.

The smell of tomatoes, oregano, basil and garlic permeated every room. Sometimes if you pressed your nose against the walls you could smell the lusciousness, the beautiful tang of the sauce.

Even in the avocado green bathroom that had cracked mirrors and rusty taps as a result of the salt spray from the beach, you could smell the deep, earthy tomato scent.

We didn’t have much money so Rosa’s brother, Guido, let us have a few items from his secondhand furniture store at cost. We got an enormous green couch that sunk in the middle, a coffee table decorated with shells and a bookcase that leaned so badly to the left we could only put books on one side of it or it fell over, for a hundred dollars.

We felt independent and fabulous, sneaking empty bottles of Chianti from Rosa’s bins and placing candles in them to save on electricity. We would drink cheap cider, dress entirely in black and pretend we were languishing in a Fellini film.

Bondi was different in those days. Unencumbered by prosperity. The shops were bustling, an eclectic mix of bookshops that actually sold poetry, the best shoe shop in Sydney (Doc Martens galore) and beachwear shops where everything was tie-dyed. For about six months I thought our neighbour, Dorina, had a fatal skin disease, until I realised her hands were stained permanently purple as a result of all the sarongs she tie-dyed.

The sea was the colour of Spanish glass. You could see it from every storefront. On a clear day it seemed to join up with the sky, touching everything with its glory.

(Image via Getty – Ian Waldie.)

Bondi has changed so much. It is now the playground of the rich and famous. Two bedroom apartments like ours would now fetch over a million dollars. One of Australia’s richest men, James Packer, lives on the main drag facing the beach in a spectacular three storey apartment that in my day was a petrol station. There are Ferraris, Porsche Carreras and Lexus SUVs everywhere you look.

In my day I remember surfers balancing their boards on pushbikes and careening down Bondi Road. I could hear them in the mornings whooping with joy as the swell took them to shore. Now the surfers have custom-designed boards perched atop the latest Range Rovers. Bondi has lost its innocence, its village atmosphere at the hands of progress. Makes me think that sometimes progress is a dirty word.

Rosa’s Trattoria is gone, replaced by restaurant after restaurant serving nouvelle cuisine, but it will always hold a place in my heart. On special occasions Mel and I wheel out our favourite recipes – Bombolini di Pollo con Brodo (Chicken Balls in Broth) for Mel; and Gnocchi di Spinacce e Pancetta (Spinach and Pancetta Gnocchi,) for me, crack open a bottle of Chianti and reminisce.