Friday, November 18, 2005
My Room
computer
hums
vacant
its monitor
blank
stares down
half a twin tower
of cheap shelving
threatening to explode
on a crash diet of Lonely Planet
and recipe books
new poetry journals
squeezed for space
voices small
in the wasteland
a calendar
ticks away the days
without gold stars
for good behaviour
the carpet grooved
from the ceaseless pacing
of wheeled chairs
and lamps that turn on
with no inspiration
tumbled shopping bags
of detritus
a refugee camp
a guitar
listless
in a corner
email me: piokiwi@yahoo.com.au
Piokiwi 2:30 pm
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
My next story. Any comments, especially critiques, are gratefully received. Oh and - if any of these characters seem familar to you, you're probably right :-.).
Desperado
She feels as if she is about to drown in a tide of humanity, one that surges out and threatens to swallow her as the sliding doors roll open. She forces herself to take a step onto the sea blue floor. The dots on the carpet blur, seem to whirl around her sandal. First one step, then another. The vortex of voices suck her in.
-if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you -
- crazy? I can’t take that through -
- hold this while I find the –
She does a clumsy breaststroke through the bodies, feels her way along the ropes dragging the heavy bag behind her. Faceless voices. Voiceless faces. A sudden space in front. A man waves. He seems very far away. “Excuse me!”
He’s wearing a gun-gray uniform, standing to attention behind a wall-like counter. He looks like a cardboard cutout. She wonders idly what would happen if she suddenly reached up and gripped his shiny satin tie. The numbers flicker red as she places her suitcase on the slick steel scales.
“And where are you going today?” the man asks. He sounds forced and jovial.
“Auckland,” she says. She finds her passport at the top of her handbag and places it on the desk.
He ruffles briskly through it. “And what are we going to do there, Miss –“ he finds the right page, and flickers his fingers over the computer keys. “ – Wu? Going back home?”
Home. The word floods through her, mocking her fragile defences, threatening to collapse them like so many sandcastles. Only a few hours ago she had clung to the anticipation of this moment, ached to get on the plane. Home, as if it would solve all her problems. As if it would wake her up from this dream, as if it would bring him back.
Luckily the man doesn’t seem to require an answer. He is already bending down, looping a long coded label through the handles of her suitcase. She hears herself speaking, as if down a long tunnel. She can’t even hear what she is saying, but he answers and then she marches away as if an invisible hand is pushing her.
Bodies surge around her, catching her up and depositing her in a front of a coffee counter. Someone in a stripy black apron, a wisp of blond hair straggling from underneath a black cap, takes the order that she gives automatically. The coffee machine stirs into a suppressed shriek.
“Would you like marshmallows in with that miss?”
“Yes, please.”
She takes the paper cup, hot and heavy with aroma, and takes a seat beside a window. The aluminium chair seems too fragile to hold her weight. Outside, the light claws its way along rusted benches, stalks parched gum trees, spearing them with long shadows. There’s a shipwreck in the courtyard. The things people will call Art. Sawtoothed prows erupt from a sea of pebbles. The wreckage claws impotently at the sky.
She finds her fingers at her throat again, fingering the smooth stone of the pendant. Its firm curves reassure her, tell her that she still exists. The stone gives off a faint heat, as if it’s stored her warmth.
She hadn’t wanted him to go to the airport with her. “I think we should say goodbye the night before,” she had said, firmly.
“Using your lawyer’s voice on me again, Tess?” he teased, touching her gently on the nose. She felt an answering tingle in her belly. Typical James. He had always been able to wriggle around the barriers she put up.
She tried to make her voice flat, emotionless. “I just think it’s better if we don’t have to say goodbye at the end,” she said. “You know why I need to go, if I don’t take this opportunity –“
He had touched her then on the lips, and laid his long body alongside hers on the mattress in his small cluttered room. The single bulb, painted last year during her glass painting phase, cast a fractured pink glow on the walls. She turned in his arms, ready to give in, but he hadn’t wanted to kiss her.
“I just want to hold you,” he said. He touched the greenstone pendant at her neck, the one he had given her on her birthday several years ago. His long fingers traced the curves delicately and then lingered on her skin. “I’m going to miss this,” he said.
Tessa sits and stares at the foam in her coffee cup. Rims of dried flotsam circle down inside the cup, towards the melted wreckage of the marshmallow. She raises the cup to her mouth and swallows, tasting the biting sweetness. Its sugar clings to the inside of her mouth.
She had seemed to settle in well. The partners at her firm had given her brief appraising nods when she had walked in that first morning, and she had taken that to mean they would give her a chance to prove herself. So she worked, often into the evening. She would emerge from the stairwell to find her car the last one left in the carpark, and drive along the lighted streets of her new city, watching the couples on the sidewalk who leaned against each other as they walked, their laughter audible even through the closed car windows.
The people seem to hurry upside-down around her, reflections on the polished floor of the food hall. Their coloured shadows billow and surge like shoals of multicoloured fish. At the next table an old man is hunched over a plate of crumbled slice with custard oozing from its pores. He has watery grey eyes like tepid pools. There’s a blanket draped around his thin shoulders, as if hiding a pair of wings. She picks up the empty cup, squeezes past his chair to get to the rubbish bin murmuring, “Excuse me”. He stares right through her, as if she is invisible. She shoulders her bag, and looks for the signs to the departure gates. There’s a silent flow of people ascending on the escalators ahead.
The phone call had come while she was asleep, rattling through the thin walls of the apartment she had now rented for six months. “Is this Tessa Wu?” an older woman’s voice asked, pulling her out of a dream in which she was lost in the middle of a grey city.
“Yes. Wha –“
“I’m terribly sorry to disturb you. I’m Sarah, the supervisor of the Intensive Care Unit here at Auckland Hospital. Are you the girlfriend – I mean ex girlfriend – of James Green?”
The hazy reality of the dream jolted further away from her. “Yes, but –“
“I’m very sorry, this is going to come as a huge shock to you. James has been involved in a serious accident. He is…he is” – and here the voice faltered slightly. A pause. “He’s not expected to last the night, and his family asked that I call you.”
She could feel the breath squeezing out of her lungs, the world simultaneously expanding and contracting around her. She hoped she was still asleep. She wanted to be still asleep.
“Tessa?” The voice was gentle. “Tessa, I know this is very hard for you. Take your time.”
She’s a tiny speck floating in an enormous ocean, invisible to the people on the shore. As she tries to keep her head above the water she can see them walking around on the beach, looking into the rockpools, searching for treasures. She can’t feel her arms and legs, can’t raise them to ask for help. Somehow, with great effort, she drifts towards a rock which becomes a uniformed man. She hands her boarding pass and passport to him. “Good afternoon and how are you today?” he says without looking up. He has short close cropped hair. He looks exactly like the stern unsmiling photo on his identification badge. Stamp. Stamp. His eyes flicker summarily over her face.
She takes the passport from him, moves toward a bank of machines attended by more uniformed men. She lays her handbag on the conveyer belt and unslings her passport pouch. The red light on the XRay machine blinks on and off.
“How was he hurt?” Tessa felt her mouth moving, but the voice didn’t seem to be hers.
Sarah’s voice came emptily down the line. “Another car hit him. He was thrown from the vehicle. He has a badly fractured skull.”
“Is he – is he …..” Tessa struggled to pull a voice from out of her nightmare.
“He’s on life support, but we don’t know if he can hear anything.” A pause. “Is there anything we can do for you?”
Tessa fingers the pendant again as she sits. The greenstone spirals smoothly under her fingers, its shape that of an embryonic fern frond. The air hostess stops momentarily beside her seat. She has a tight smile, the edges of her face stretched like a balloon skin. She’s close enough for Tessa to see the mascara on her lashes, a spiked fence around drops of ice blue iris.
Her body seemed to want to turn itself inside out. Her mind was screaming at her, ordering to her to wake up from this impossible dream. A hundred questions fought to be heard, to be voiced, yet she stayed silent.
“Tessa?” Sarah said patiently.
“I’m getting on the first plane in the morning.”
“I know dear, but – he might not make it.”
The room seemed to constrict on her like a cage. A sigh came out of her, a sigh that gained voice until it became a cry. Her breath started coming in great sobs.
“Can you tell him something for me?” This, high pitched, so wavering she was not sure she could be understood.
“Of course.”
“Tell him –“ the image of a nurse bending over James’ sleeping body came to her. It seemed oddly incongruous, clichéd, just like what she was about to say. But now she meant every word. “Tell him that I love him.”
The engines whir into life, their energy seeming to surge through her as the plane gains speed, hurtling faster and faster across the tarmac. Tessa hunches into the seat, her shoulders clenched, eyes closed. As she feels the plane leave the ground she opens her eyes and the tears come. The world beneath her is tilting and shrinking, the buildings fading to tiny raised squares. The sea seems to spill over the rocks guarding the grey harbour. A wisp of cloud slides past the window, momentarily obscuring her vision, and when it clears Tessa sees the sun again, shining weakly over the sea.
email me: piokiwi@yahoo.com.au
Piokiwi 10:27 pm
Sunday, September 11, 2005
The images from the Lousiana storm sometimes last longer than the flicker of a TV screen, the turn of a newspaper page. They resonate past the lives of those people, each one of them precious and real in themselves (despite what Barbara Bush might say). They reach out to me, and in moment of egocentricity I imagine myself in the middle of a flooded lounge room, staring at the wreckage of my life underwater, my hopes and dreams drowning or at least a bit flood damaged. I don't care in this moment, because I have found a new vessel to float in, one which is still just a few bits of wood cobbled together, and the only thing which will hold them together is my own determination.
sigh. I don't know why I am speaking in such riddles at the moment. Basically I have a great new plan for my life. I think I'll sideline medicine in 2007 and try to get into the writing course at Victoria University which is very prestigious - it won't be easy, but it'll be fun trying, and at the very least my writing should improve whicle I try. First - write more, and get critiqued. Second - try to get published more. This means regular and dilligent trawling of the competition and journal websites.
to start - my new short story. First for four years! (this will get updated as I revise drafts - this is draft nunber one.)
Voodoo
I had always been the teacher’s pet until I met Mrs Bier. I had just started at St Margaret’s, and I remember sliding down from the van and seeing the school gates on that first morning, their stones starkly white against the dark asphalt. My father pulsed the engine and said without looking at me, “Good luck.” Then he was gone.
It was1984. The cicadas pierced the summer sky with their song as I walked up the wide drive, the backs of my shoes stiff against my heels. The tartan fabric swung uneasily against my flat chest and the elastic of the fake tie seemed to want to choke me. A squad of thin girls stared as I tiptoed up the drive, their limbs shining palely against the dark tree trunks. I felt as if they were burning holes in my uniform with their eyes.
“You’re late,” said a woman with a thick twist of bleached hair when I finally found my classroom. Sets of faceless eyes swiveled silently. I breathed hard to keep up with the tympanic thudding of my heart and I became aware of a rim of fat creeping shamefully up my glasses. The woman smiled, her mouth a perfect stretched U. “Don’t you ever be late again,” she said, batting her thick black lashes at me and drawing a large X on the class roll.
The blond woman turned out to be Mrs Bier, my Form One class mistress. In the beginning I was thrilled to have such a gorgeous and young teacher. Mrs Bier would sit, queen like on her throne, with us fawning in little piles of tartan at her feet. We vied to please her because every Friday afternoon, she would give out little cardboard shields decorated with sparkly stickers to those who had pleased her the most. “Well done!” or “For the most improved student” was written in large careful printing on the shields. She quickly identified a court of talented students, and these she would exempt from normal classroom work and set to special tasks: working on a painted medal tally mural for the coming Olympics for example, or cutting out more cardboard shields. But although I tried hard to display my gifts she never picked me.
Instead, she seemed to ignore me most of the time. “Who is representing New Zealand in the swimming?”, she would ask, and my hand would shoot up, almost punching an additional hole in the plasterboard ceiling with its rows of little drill holes. The rest of the class gazed down, some secretly reading the anarchic wisdoms etched by our predecessors into the desks. “Well, class?”, Mrs Bier would ask, twirling a blond lock between her fingers, and sometimes she would flick a glance at me and snap, “Let others have a turn, Angela!”. On occasions when I was bent over my work I would glance up to see her staring at me, the mascara matted on her lashes, and suddenly it was as if someone had squeezed ice water down my back.
I took to spending my lunchtimes in the library. I would eat my food quickly and make my way into the dim polished corridors of the Old Building, the sound of my footsteps bouncing off the dark wood paneling. Once in the curtained warmth of the library with its smell of stale coffee, I would pick a random shelf and graze on words, plunging into other worlds until roused by the school bell. At that time I loved the science books best, with their print marching like black and white soldiers onwards towards the truth. I had decided I wanted to win a Nobel Prize one day, but thought I’d better start preparing early.
During classroom tests Mrs Bier prowled the space between our desks, pausing for a heavy moment just behind me. In those suspended moments I sometimes sneaked a glance sideways and down to where her slim ankles crouched in their sharp toed shoes, like a pair of impatient tigers. She never took off those high heels, nor her pearl necklace with matching earrings, not even when she was supervising us for PE. I said to my desk buddy Tash that the pearls must be fake, but Tash informed me that Mrs Bier’s father was chairman of the St Margaret’s board and that was why she had got the job teaching, and that the pearls were from Mrs Bier’s new husband, a playboy banker. Tash knew a lot more about real life than me. Her wide lips curled in amusement when I confided in her that I thought Mrs Bier hated me. “That’s because you’re smarter than her,” she said slyly.
Tash was having troubles of her own. A group of girls led by Sarah Murphy from our class seemed to enjoy baiting her. They were the ones who always wore their cardigans a certain way, slung low and loose off the shoulders to give an impression of perpetual slouch. By the way they constantly flicked their hair off their faces and called each other “Darling”, one would think they owned the school. When we changed classrooms for Maths they stood in front of the desk where Tash and I had just sat down. “You can’t sit there,” said Sarah, who liked to be called Murph. Tash stared steadily back. “Why can’t I?” she said. “It’s a free world.” Murph folded her arms and said, “It’s my desk, you brown turd” and before I had a chance to work out what a turd was Tash shot straight back, “I’m not moving!”. “Oh yeah?” snarled Murph, and reached down and grabbed Tash’s pencil case and threw it across the room. It hit the window with a loud tonk and pencils clattered to the floor. I had just opened my mouth to say, ”That’s not fair!” when my chair was suddenly pulled out from under me and I fell sprawling heavily against Tash, who had also been tipped from her chair. A pair of Murph’s groupies stood sneering down at us.
At this moment Mrs Bier slid into view. “Girls!” she said, in an outraged tone. “What is this? Just because Miss Jones is not here yet does not mean you can behave like this!” She gazed coolly at Tash and I tangled together on the floor. The burgundy line of her lips bent in a cruel arc. “Angela and Natasha, no wonder you never get picked for teams if you are so clumsy,” she said, and turned and left the room.
“I wish her entrails would fall out and she would die”, I muttered darkly, from the safety of the old tree stump at lunchtime. “She’s just an old faggot,” I added, vaguely using a word I had once heard my father use. Tash sat beside me moodily munching her sandwich and checking her black hair for split ends. “Stuff her, the old bag”, she said. “She’s just one of them.” I dropped down beside her and swung my legs over the side of the huge old stump. Several ghostly cicada shells clung to the wood, their crisp shells bent as if in prayer. I plucked one and hooked it thoughtfully on my blazer. “I wish we could get her back in some way.” I opened my lunchbox and groaned. My mother in her usual pesticide poisoning paranoia had peeled the grapes again. They stared back at me, like glistening pale green eyeballs plucked out in a rite of sacrifice. I had a sudden idea.
The book had a pinched yellow dust jacket, and I saw that the last person to take it out did so in 1979. As I signed my name and slid the faded pink card into the Borrowed slot I noticed the sweat beading my palms. Ancient rites and religions. I opened the book and a smell of something old and indescribably mysterious seemed to waft out of it. A tingling began at my fingers, ran slowly along the underside of my arms and started creeping up my neck. My glasses were getting dirty again but I didn’t want to stop to clean them. I found the section headed “Curses” and read through the fog:
Voodoo dolls were not as common as curse tablets, though they still were prevalent. They were commonly made of lead or bronze. Wax dolls were found in Egypt in late antiquity.
C.A. Faraone, in his survey of all known voodoo dolls, set specific criteria – the dolls must meet at least 2 of the following criteria to be included:
(1) the doll’s arms or legs are twisted behind its back as if bound (2) the doll is transfixed with nails (3) the head or feet or upper torso of the doll has been twisted back to front (4) the doll is tightly shut in a container (5) the doll has been inscribed with a victim’s name (6) the doll has been discovered in a grave, sanctuary or in (what was) water.
The book went on to describe other ancient curses, but by now the words were flowing faster and faster under my eyes, as if a river was sweeping them out of sight. The bell rang. I was glad to get through Music and Social Studies, both subjects I usually enjoyed because they weren’t taught by Mrs Bier, and get home so I could put my plan into practice.
I knew, from when we had to make lists of everything for a Civil Defence project, that my father kept some candles in his dusty toolbox. Since he was always complaining he didn’t have time to open the toolbox anymore I figured he wouldn’t miss one. As a bonus I also found some fuse wire which could have been made of lead. The task of making a straight candle look doll-like had me stumped for a while, but in the end I stole some of my sister’s Barbie stickers and beheaded one to stick on my doll, and tied her up with fuse wire. I was quite pleased at my work. I thought the blond hair and flawless makeup seemed somehow suitable for a doll that represented Mrs Bier.
I took some of my mother’s pearl headed pins and stuck them into the wax, trying to think of some dark incantations to go with my actions, but just ended up singing, “Doo-do Doo-do Doo-do Doo-do”, like Jaws, and feeling suddenly juvenile. The flush of the fantasy was wearing off. I found an old Griffin’s biscuit tin with a picture of an elegant lady enjoying a cup of tea and a biscuit. I put the doll-wax-candle in and taped it up with sellotape. Then I remembered I hadn’t written the victim’s name on the candle, so I had to open up the box again and scratch “Bier”, in slashed writing with the tip of a kitchen knife before sealing it back in the tin.
Luckily my parents always thought I was up in my room doing homework, so I could sneak out the front door, across the road and into the reserve where a creek limped its increasingly choked way past the shedding tree ferns. I stood on the overbridge and leaned out into the dusk. Below me the creek gleamed faintly in the fading light, greeting the tin with a resigned splash. The edge of the tin bobbed up once, twice and then was carried off into the darkness.
I had forgotten all about the voodoo doll by the next morning. When I got to school I noticed that Mrs Bier looked different. I stared at her a while before I realized that her usually flawless makeup was slipping like a stage mask. Her mascara was smeared in grey shadows around her eyes, and her red lipstick had leaked so that it appeared the side of her mouth was cracking. She didn’t seem to be able to speak to us in her usual way and instead read out the roll in such a distant voice that I thought she looked like a ventriloquist’s dummy. The morning sun slanted in through the window and hit the pearls around her neck, making them glow so that they seemed to overpower the shadow of Mrs Bier. That was the last I ever saw of her. When we came back in after morning tea Mrs Ashley, the bland substitute teacher, was sitting at her desk.
Mrs Ashley acted like nothing was the matter but Tash had the answer to the question that began to circulate in frenzied notes around the classroom. At lunchtime people seemed to suddenly discover her desirability as a friend as she recounted what she had overheard some teachers say. “They said Mrs Bier’s husband died,” she confided to the large audience. She pressed her lips together and left them there for a while, to add to the suspense. Finally she unstuck them and went on. “He got run over by a car,” adding salaciously, “he got taken off the life-support machines this morning.”
A loud buzzing filled my head, rising in pitch until it felt as if hundreds of cicadas were squeezed into every conceivable niche in my skull. Voodoo! Voodoo! they sang as if in worship or horror. The light in the classroom seemed suddenly to fade, and even though one part of my brain – the part that was going to win a Nobel prize – knew that the sun had just gone behind a cloud, the other part of me was clenched in horror that all the light was draining from the world and I would see the world in perpetual shades of grey. The vision of my hand clenching the knife that carved the name of Bier – Mr Bier – into the wax – replayed itself over and over, over and over and over, until the lipstick-red blood dripped from the wax into the creek where I was frantically wading, stumbling against the dead fern fronds in my futile search for the tin.
Note: Acknowledgement is made of a resource on the internet entitled “Greco-Roman Curses: Voodoo Dolls” for the “textbook quote” in the body of the story. The words in Arial font (one paragraph) are copied or paraphrased from this resource and are not my own original work.
Revision 21/10/05: Spot the differences!
Voodoo
I had always been the teacher’s pet until I met Mrs Bier. I had just started at St Margaret’s, and I remember sliding down from the van and seeing the school gates on that first morning, their stones starkly white against the dark asphalt. My father pulsed the engine and said without looking at me, “Good luck.” Then he was gone.
The cicadas pierced the summer sky with their song as I walked up the wide drive, the backs of my shoes stiff against my heels. The tartan fabric shifted uneasily against my flat chest and the elastic of the fake tie seemed to want to choke me. A squad of thin girls stared as I tiptoed up the drive, their limbs shining pale against the dark tree trunks. I felt as if they were scorching holes in my uniform with their eyes.
“You’re late,” said a woman with a thick twist of bleached hair when I finally found my classroom. Sets of faceless eyes swiveled, silent. I breathed hard over the tympanic thudding of my heart. I became aware of a rim of grease creeping shamefully up my glasses. The woman smiled, her mouth a perfect stretched U. “Don’t you ever be late again,” she said, batting her thick black lashes at me and marking a large X on the class roll.
The blond woman turned out to be Mrs Bier, my Form One class mistress. In the beginning I was thrilled to have such a gorgeous young teacher. Mrs Bier would sit, a queen on her throne, with us fawning in little piles of tartan at her feet. We vied to please her because every Friday afternoon, she would give out cardboard shields decorated with sparkly stickers to those who had pleased her the most. “Well done!” or “For the most improved student” was written in large careful printing on the shields. She quickly identified a court of talented students, and these she would exempt from normal classroom work and set to special tasks: working on a painted medal tally mural for the coming Olympics for example, or cutting out more cardboard shields. But although I tried hard to display my gifts she never picked me.
Instead, she seemed to ignore me most of the time. “Who is representing New Zealand in the swimming?” she would ask, and my hand would shoot up, as if to punch through the plasterboard ceiling with its rows of little drill holes. The rest of the class gazed down, some secretly reading the anarchic wisdoms etched by our predecessors into the desks. “Well, class?” Mrs Bier would ask, twirling a blond lock between her fingers, and sometimes she would flick a glance at me and snap, “Let others have a turn, Angela!” On occasions when I was bent over my work I would glance up to see her staring at me, the mascara matted on her lashes, and suddenly it was as if someone had tightened a rope around my chest.
The library was my sanctuary. I would eat my lunch quickly and make my way into the dim polished corridors of the Old Building, the sound of my footsteps bouncing off the dark wood paneling. Once in the curtained warmth of the library with its smell of stale coffee, I would pick a random shelf and graze on words, plunging into other worlds until roused by the school bell. At that time I loved the science books best, with their print marching like black and white soldiers onwards towards the truth. I had decided I wanted to win a Nobel Prize one day, and thought I’d better start preparing early.
During classroom tests Mrs Bier prowled the space between our desks, pausing for a heavy second just behind me. In those suspended moments I sometimes sneaked a glance sideways and down to where her slim ankles crouched on their sharp toed shoes.. She never took off those high heels, nor her pearl necklace with matching earrings, not even when she was supervising us for PE. I overheard another girl saying that Mrs Bier’s father was chairman of the St Margaret’s board and that was why she had got the job teaching, and that the pearls were from Mrs Bier’s new husband, a playboy banker. I heard them giggling over the word “playboy”. They knew a lot more about real life than me.
I was learning some things fast though. A group of girls led by Sarah Murphy from our class decided to hate me. They were the ones who always wore their cardigans a certain way, slung low and loose off the shoulders to give an impression of perpetual slouch. By the way they constantly flicked their hair off their faces and called each other “Darling”, one would think they owned the school. When we changed classrooms for Maths they stood in front of the desk where I had just sat down. “You can’t sit there,” said Sarah, who liked to be called Murph, “it’s my desk.” I looked up at her, surprised. She always sat at the back of the classroom, whispering with her friends in a clutch of ponytails. “Why not?” I said.
Murph stared down at me, her wide lips curling. She said, “Because you’re a little yellow turd,” and before I had a chance to work out what a turd was Murph had snatched my pencil case and thrown it across the room. It hit the window with a loud tonk and pencils clattered to the floor.
I had just opened my mouth to say,”That’s not fair!” when my chair was suddenly pulled out from under me and I fell sprawling to the floor. A pair of Murph’s groupies stood sneering down at me.
At this moment Mrs Bier slid into view. “Girls!” she snapped,. “What is this? Just because Miss Jones is not here yet does not mean you can behave like this!” She gazed coolly at me lying on the floor. The burgundy line of her lips bent in a cruel arc. “Angela, no wonder you never get picked for teams if you are so clumsy,” she said, and turned and left the room.
“I wish her entrails would fall out and she would die”, I muttered darkly to no one in particular, from the safety of the old tree stump at lunchtime. “Stuff her, the old bag, she’s just one of them.” I swung my legs over the side of the huge old stump. Several ghostlike cicada shells clung to the wood, their crisp shells bent as if in prayer. I plucked one and hooked it thoughtfully on my blazer. “I wish I could get her back.” I opened my lunchbox and groaned. My mother in her usual pesticide poisoning paranoia had peeled the grapes again. They stared back at me, like glistening pale green eyeballs plucked out in a rite of sacrifice. I had a sudden idea.
The book had a pinched yellow dust jacket, and I saw that the last person to take it out had done so in 1979. As I signed my name and slid the faded pink card into the Borrowed slot I noticed the sweat beading my palms. Ancient rites and religions. I opened the book and a smell of something old and indescribably mysterious seemed to waft out of it. A tingling began at my fingers, slid along the underside of my arms and started creeping up my neck. My glasses were getting dirty again but I didn’t want to stop to clean them.
Voodoo dolls were not as common as curse tablets, though they still were prevalent. They were commonly made of lead or bronze. Wax dolls were found in Egypt in late antiquity.
C.A. Faraone, in his survey of all known voodoo dolls, set specific criteria – the dolls must meet at least 2 of the following criteria to be included: (1) the doll’s arms or legs are twisted behind its back as if bound (2) the doll is transfixed with nails (3) the head or feet or upper torso of the doll has been twisted back to front (4) the doll is tightly shut in a container (5) the doll has been inscribed with a victim’s name (6) the doll has been discovered in a grave, sanctuary or in (what was) water.
The book went on to describe other ancient curses, but by now the words were flowing faster and faster under my eyes, as if a river was sweeping them out of sight. The bell rang. I was glad to get through Music and Social Studies, both subjects I usually enjoyed because they weren’t taught by Mrs Bier, and get home for the weekend so I could put my plan into practice.
I knew, from when we had to make lists of everything for a Civil Defence project, that my father kept some candles in his dusty toolbox and I figured he wouldn’t miss one. As a bonus I also found some fuse wire which could have been made of lead. The task of making a straight candle look doll-like had me stumped for a while, but in the end I stole one of my sister’s Barbies and beheaded it to stick on my doll, and tied her up with fuse wire. I was quite pleased with my work.
I took some of my mother’s pearl headed pins and stuck them into the wax, trying to think of some dark incantations to go with my actions, but just ended up singing, “Doo-do Doo-do Doo-do Doo-do”, like Jaws, and feeling suddenly silly. The flush of the fantasy was wearing off but I told myself how evil Mrs Bier was and carried on. I found an old Griffin’s biscuit tin with a picture of an elegant lady enjoying a cup of tea and a biscuit. I put the doll-wax-candle in and taped it up with sellotape. Then I remembered I hadn’t written the victim’s name on the candle, so I had to open up the box again and scratch “Bier”, in slashed writing with the tip of a kitchen knife before sealing it back in the tin.
I sneaked out the front door, across the road and into the reserve where a creek limped its increasingly choked way past the shedding tree ferns. I stood on the overbridge and leaned out into the dusk. Below me the creek gleamed faintly in the fading light, greeting the tin with a resigned splash. The edge of the tin bobbed up once, twice and then was carried off into the darkness.
By Monday the memory of voodoo doll had drifted from my mind. When I got to school I noticed that Mrs Bier looked different. I stared at her a while before I realized that her usually flawless makeup was slipping like a stage mask. Her mascara was smeared in grey shadows around her eyes, and her red lipstick had leaked so that it appeared the side of her mouth was cracking. She didn’t seem to be able to speak to us in her usual way and instead read out the roll in such a distant voice that she seemed like a ventriloquist’s dummy. I wondered why I had never noticed the dark roots at the parting of her hair. She was human after all. The morning sun slanted in through the window and hit the pearls around her neck, making them glow so that they seemed to overpower the shadow of Mrs Bier. That was the last I ever saw of her. When we came back in after morning tea Mrs Ashley, the bland relief teacher, was sitting at her desk.
Mrs Ashley acted like nothing was the matter but by lunchtime the information was being passed around in hastily written notes. At lunchtime Murph held court. “They said Mrs Bier’s husband died,” she confided to the large audience. She pressed her lips together and left them there for a while, to add to the suspense. Finally she unstuck them and went on. “He got run over by a car,” adding salaciously, “he got taken off the life-support machines this morning.”
A loud buzzing filled my head, rising in pitch until it felt as if hundreds of cicadas were squeezed into every conceivable niche in my skull. Voodoo! Voodoo! they sang as if in worship or horror. The light in the classroom seemed suddenly to fade, and even though one part of my brain knew that the sun had just gone behind a cloud, the rest of me was clenched in horror that all the light was draining from the world and I would see the world in perpetual shades of grey. The vision of my hand clenching the knife that carved the name of Bier – only Bier – into the wax – replayed itself over and over, over and over and over, until I thought I saw the lipstick-red blood dripping from the wax into the creek where I was frantically wading, stumbling against the dead fern fronds in my futile search for the tin.
Should I have taken out Tash? Votes please!
email me: piokiwi@yahoo.com.au
Piokiwi 11:54 pm
Friday, August 12, 2005
At the moment, my mind feels a little like the sand at the very edge of the beach, the grains constantly rearranged by the surf. It's been a rough week. I've burst into tears in three different offices in front of superiors. I've sat in education meetings with fat tears rolling down my cheeks for reasons entirely unrelated to the case studies being presented. I've gabbled on about meaningless topics at lunchtime in a effort to distract my companions, and myself, from the tears welling up in my eyes.
So why?
Well.... there are all the usual precipitating factors; the stress of the job; the increased workload in winter. I could even use the age-old female excuse and blame the excess hormones unleashed at "the time of the month". All these are mere precipitants. The fact is, I'm back at the crossroads.
For some years now, I've felt like a traveller at a crossroads wondering which path to take. Sometimes I stand experimentally on one or another path, sometimes I try to stand outside both to get a different view; sometimes I spot a smaller, fainter path snaking off through the grass and wonder whether I should try that instead. At times I've sprinted off up a road, only to slow to a walk, fearful of the new scenery. Several times I've rounded a corner only to find myself back at the old crossroads.
One road, the path of medicine, is familiar to me. I look behind me with pride at all the obstacles I've already negotiated, and then with trepidation at the challenges, the unseen rockfalls, to come. I remember the picture in the brochure which made me come all this way. It was a picture of a wise looking, serene woman, replete with the knowledge and grace she had gifted to the world. The other battered travellers I've met on the road so far do not fit this picture, although all of them have had their measure of wisdom and experience. Some of them talked to me for a while before plunging off down the other road.
The other road is beautiful and terrifying at the same time. It meanders among the mountain pastures for a while, stopping to admire the alpine daisies, then suddenly curves around a large rock. I can't see where it goes from here, but I have a feeling the path gets steeper. I think there may be unexpected views along this path, maybe even a spectacular summit. But it's known as a hard path, this writer's path, and not all can make it to the end.
email me: piokiwi@yahoo.com.au
Piokiwi 11:02 pm
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Over a year since my last post. I've been busy in other forums; nibbling away at the cakecrumbs of experience in my travels; struggling to rediscover the meaning I once found in medicine. And yes, that old bugbear, romance. (What IS a bugbear exactly? must be a strange beast).
Ah yes, that "L" word. Love. How can that strange word, so lilting, so soft from the tongue, be wielded so often with the direct force of a sharp knife to the heart? Professional women lose their usual smooth assurance and gag before using it. Grown men run rather than hear it. It is bright and shiny as plastic, smooth and rich as chocolate, bitter as lemon rind and brain-dulling as absinthe.
Ah, love. I fear it and I want it.
email me: piokiwi@yahoo.com.au
Piokiwi 11:28 pm
/// ///
|
|
|