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
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