online New Writing from In this Issue Western Australia Tracy Ryan Literature & Ideas Fiction Chiké Frankie Edozien Poetry Timmah Ball Creative Nonfiction Holden Sheppard Omar Sakr ‘Priest of Returning to loneliness can feel like family once you’ve known it Cheesy Fries’ Omar Sakr Long enough once you’ve fought it said you hate it & come

To love it

Westerly acknowledges all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as First Australians, celebrating their culture, history, diversity and deep connection to the land. We celebrate the continuous living cultures of Indigenous people and their vital contributions within Australian society.

Westerly’s office, at the University of Western Australia, is located on Whadjak Noongar land. We would like to recognise the Noongar people as the spiritual and cultural custodians of this land. Westerly Online Special Issue 9, New Writing from Literature & Ideas, 2020 online Western Australia and Notice of Intention Publisher the 2020 Perth Festival Westerly has converted the full backfile of Westerly Centre, The University of Western Australia, Australia Literature & Ideas Literature & Ideas Westerly (1956–) to electronic text, available General Editor to readers and researchers on the Westerly weekend Catherine Noske website, www.westerlymag.com.au. This work has been supported by a grant from Associate Editor the Cultural Fund of the Copyright Agency Josephine Taylor Limited. Editorial Advisors All creative works, articles and reviews Paul Munden (poetry) converted to electronic format will be correctly Rachel Robertson (prose) attributed and will appear as published. Elfie Shiosaki (Indigenous writing) Copyright will remain with the authors, and the Editorial Consultants material cannot be further republished without Delys Bird (The University of Western Australia) authorial permission. Westerly will honour any Barbara Bynder requests to withdraw material from electronic Westerly Caterina Colomba (Università del Salento) publication. If any author does not wish their Tanya Dalziell (The University of Western Australia) work to appear in this format, please contact Paul Genoni (Curtin University) Westerly immediately and your material will Dennis Haskell (The University of Western Australia) be withdrawn. John Kinsella (Curtin University) Contact: [email protected] Ambelin Kwaymullina (The University of Western Australia) Guest edited by Susan Lever (Hon. Associate, The University of Sydney) John Mateer Caitlin Maling and Tracy Ryan (The University of Western Australia) Andrew Taylor (Edith Cowan University) Daniel Juckes Corey Wakeling (Kobe College, Japan) David Whish-Wilson (Curtin University) Terri-ann White (The University of Western Australia Publishing)

Administrator Daniel Juckes

Commissioning Editors Cassandra Atherton Lucy Dougan

Web Editor Chris Arnold

Production Design: Chil3 Typesetting: Lasertype Print: UniPrint, The University of Western Australia

Front cover: Design: Chil3. Image: Detail from Paige Kenney, Banksia Kaarla, 8' × 6', acrylic and gouche on canvas, 2019. © Paige Kenney. Reproduced with the artist’s permission.

All academic work published in Westerly is peer-reviewed. Copyright of each piece belongs to the author; copyright of the collection belongs to the Westerly Centre. Republication is permitted on request to author and editor. Westerly is published biannually with assistance from the State Government of WA by an investment in this project through the Culture and the Arts (WA) division of the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, and from the Australia Council for the Arts. The opinions expressed in Westerly are those of individual contributors and not of the Editors or Editorial Advisors. From the Editors

From the Editors 7

Literature Note from Festival Zainab Zahra Syed ‘Love’ is a singularly daunting word. It’s broad and bold and complex, and, & Ideas Director 10 Theatre 39 as curator Sisonke Msimang noted in her speech to launch her Literature Timmah Ball Rafeif Ismail & Ideas programme for this year’s Perth Festival, it is a thing, a substance, Imaginary Conversations Event Horizons 42 in vast deficit within public life. So, how to right that wrong? How to build About the Past and the Ahmed Yussuf Future 13 love back into discourse? These are the unanswerable questions Sisonke ‘A History of Cutting off got us thinking about through her speech. They are questions which can Omar Sakr Its History’ 44 Priest of Cheesy Fries 17 only be approached piecemeal, cautiously, and with hope. But, with that slow Holden Sheppard and measured engagement, they become questions suggesting answers: Tracy Ryan Irreversible 51 In-Laws 18 perhaps love can creep back into prominence by talking boldly of it? By the Ashleigh Angus doing of it, unashamedly? Or by writing of it, and in the spirit of it, and in the Jay Anderson The Flat 57 championing of the connection it implies. For connection is the bedrock of A Private Sermon 20 David Stavanger Chiké Frankie Edozien We’re Going to Get the kind of reassertion Sisonke advocated—not some glib, momentary thing, Amebo 24 Nailed 66 but a proper noticing which might result in a true realignment of values. Marie O’Rourke There is plenty of love in the pages to come. And there is plenty of Of Snowballs and noticing too, along with the necessary frankness required for clearheaded Survival 30 conversation. In this sense, the works here enact that most mystic bond: between the interlocutor who dwells on the other side of page or screen, seeking something in order to grow themselves, and the writer, busy trying to make something grow. This relationship is where literature might work to shape public life, for in the intimacy it requires there is evidence of the necessity of connection—a necessity described by Sven Birkerts, in The Submissions 68 Gutenberg Elegies. He says, ‘The reader assumes the possibility of deepened Subscriptions 69 self-understanding, and therefore recognises the self as malleable. Reading is the intimate, perhaps secret, part of a larger project’ (87). The themes of this year’s Literature & Ideas weekend are Land, Money, Power and Sex. These are all, without doubt, words which imply larger projects. This special issue of Westerly gathers festival guests and local writers together, in a chorus which seeks to respond to each theme—and, in doing so, to emphasise the need for closeness and intimacy in the lives we live.

7 | Caitlin Maling and Daniel Juckes Each theme is amply represented. We were pleased by the lack of simple statement that ‘a married couple loving each other doesn’t sound squeamishness with which our writers tackled sex, and by the ways in which extraordinary’, pulls us back to the complexity of Sisonke’s primary concern. sex became a conduit for all kinds of different conversations. For instance, Finally, festival guest Ahmed Yussuf’s journalistic essay on the history of it’s hard to read a memoir piece like local festival guest Jay Anderson’s, soccer in Australia dares to question the hegemonies and power relations which ends on the line ‘I’m a dick hungry catholic, Mrs Hayes’, without structuring all the codes of football across the country. All these works are succumbing to joy. Another local writer and festival guest, Holden Sheppard, enclosed by a cover which features a painting by talented local artist and delivers an equally captivating coming-out short story, which questions how poet Paige Kenney, for whom ‘land’, and Country, are primary concerns. different masculinities offer and withhold power. The aims of this special issue of Westerly are twofold. The first is to Anderson’s piece also introduces questions regarding power and the archive something of the essence of the Literature & Ideas weekend. The Church, a subject local poet Tracy Ryan tackles, with her signature wit and second is to showcase some of the best of Western Australia’s established lyrical dexterity, in ‘In-Laws’. Ryan takes us outside Perth and Western and emerging writers. We hope that we have accomplished both. One more Australia, in keeping with Artistic Director Ian Grandage’s vision for the thing we hoped to capture within this volume is the undiluted generosity festival, to show Perth as an outward-looking city. This vision, we feel, is with which the festival—and the Literature & Ideas weekend—has been present in our selection, particularly on the theme of ‘land’. Festival poets curated. Sisonke and Anna Kosky have been inspirational guides and we Zainab Syed and Rafeif Ismail (now both living in Western Australia), offer are grateful to them—as we are to the team at Westerly: Catherine Noske, compelling poems of warfare, Syed’s moving from the Afghanistan front Josephine Taylor and Chris Arnold. We received spadefuls of generosity, too, to the home of a departed American soldier, while Ismail’s keeps us in the from the authors here represented, and we know that the spirit of sharing bodies of those displaced by conflict, never reaching, as she puts it, the can be sensed in their work. Yes, there are some difficult subjects on show ‘event horizon’. in the following pages; but the bringing together of words from, and about, Conflict, power and land register in different tones in festival writer David difficulty is part of the hope inherent in the endeavour of art. What’s more, Stavanger’s very contemporary bushfire poem, ‘We’re Going to Get Nailed’, you cannot love those you are not honest with. Writing—and publishing that where he asks ‘Have you ever seen a footpath on fire? / No, because there’s writing—is a bizarre type of intimacy. Nowhere is this more apparent than nothing to burn’. Local writer Ashleigh Angus reveals a similar horror in the at writers’ festivals, which bring together the worlds of writer, reader and shifting scales of power—this time those inherent to apartment living—in writing. The themes of this year’s Literature & Ideas weekend, though big her deliciously creepy short story, ‘The Flat’. and bold—like love itself—can all be looked at as intimate concerns when Festival poet Omar Sakr’s poem ‘Priest of Cheesy Fries’ keeps us in the the line between page and eye is drawn. suburbs, questioning the intersection of desire, love and capital; ‘The other Of course, as Sisonke reminded us during her speech, this is not the time night in the restaurant I saw lobster’, he writes, ‘flirted with fancy / I can’t for deliberate sensationalism. You will not find that here, despite the grand imagine eating something so rich not with this filthy / Body’. Angus’ and claims above. Simply, in this special issue, we are seeking communication. Sakr’s work reveals that land, to Australian writers, is not a simple pastoral Because ours is a time in need of the deep engagement a poem or story bucolic. This is even more apparent in Timmah Ball’s experimental work of brings; and, hopefully—with the private acknowledgment of another that fiction, ‘Imaginary Conversations About the Past and the Future’. Ball shifts reading requires—we can enact some of the process of refilling our hearts, us from the suburbs of Melbourne to New York City, through the lodges of in order to put love back into the centre of our public lives. Twin Peaks and back again, without ever letting our relationship to any place go unquestioned: ‘I stop writing about culture or connection to the land Caitlin Maling and Daniel Juckes, February 2020 because I’m not that naïve and most mornings I wake up on the upper east’. International festival guest Chiké Frankie Edozien returns us to New York—this time from Nigeria—in a moving piece of memoir charting his Works Cited development as a writer against the loves and lands he is inspired by. Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The fate of reading in an electronic age. London: Mapping her family’s very different migration, from Europe to Kalgoorlie, Faber and Faber, 1996. local writer Marie O’Rourke’s memoir, which starts from the seeming

8 | Westerly online 9 | Caitlin Maling and Daniel Juckes A Note on the Issue of writing, and of the arts in general—helping us to imagine our world as it might be, not just as it is. At a time of political and ecological turmoil, the writers involved both in the Festival and this issue have reminded us of the role of the artist. In the words of Pablo Picasso, speaking at a similarly turbulent moment, the artist ‘is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate or delightful things that happen on the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.’ (48) Picasso is correct. We have seen the way the story ends when bullets are chosen over paintbrushes. The work in this issue has made its way here, to this space of literary endeavour and humane aspiration, because When we were children, 2020 seemed like the year the future would it is steeped in a spirit of generosity. begin. It was the year zero of science fiction, the point at which human In each piece you will find both love and ferocity. We can think of no achievement would either peak or explode. So far as bushfires rage and better way to greet the future and to address the demons of the past. temperatures soar, it feels more apocalyptic than transcendent. The future has arrived and humans are not ready for it. Catherine Noske, General Editor of Westerly Magazine The symbolism of this year and the challenges we are facing form the Sisonke Msimang, Curator: Literature & Ideas backdrop for the themes of this Online Special Issue of Westerly, which is produced as a collaboration with the Perth Festival. Both the Perth Festival and Westerly are deeply invested in Work Cited understanding and examining the history of colonisation and violence Téry, Simone. ‘Picasso n'est pas officier dans l'armée française’ [interview, ‘Picasso is that has marked this place. Both are equally invested in what it means to not an officer in the French army’], March 24, 1945, in Les Lettres Françaises, build a just future that reckons with that past. We understand how heavily 5 (1945): 48. this history weighs on the present. We know far too well that it affects the use and distribution of land, the leveraging of power, the importance of money and the materiality of sex in contemporary life. The work you will find in this issue is born of these mutual concerns. Each of the works selected seek to explore the questions of land, money, power and sex—questions we believe are most urgent. The programme of Literature & Ideas that the Perth Festival has curated for 2020 has been inspired by a desire to grapple with important themes in the public domain. It is driven by a belief that these issues can only be addressed meaningfully if the interlocutors in these debates choose to deploy love in service of their agendas, rather than hate. Violence and fear can be met with empathy and hope. Westerly has been proud to work with the Festival, furthering these debates and collecting these words in a more permanent form than the necessarily ephemeral moment of the Literature and Ideas weekend. In the Magazine’s long history of publishing, writers have always sought to ask questions of our society, and to imagine different futures. This is one part of the great value

10 | Westerly online 11 | Catherine Noske and Sisonke Msimang Imaginary Conversations Timmah Ball is an emerging About the Past and the Future nonfiction writer of Ballardong PERTH Noongar heritage whose Timmah Ball writing is influenced by studying and working in the FESTIVAL field of urban planning. In 2016 she won the Westerly magazine Patricia Hackett Prize, and her writing has appeared in a range of anthologies and literary journals.

1. We don’t live here anymore Courtney said I should look out further, she said it wouldn’t hurt us. She carefully explained that I didn’t need all these coffee shops. So I drove out to Preston, attracted by her deadpan wisdom, following the multi-story dwellings developing down High. It wasn’t that depressing: just discount stores, supermarkets and a Lentil as Anything serving the latest wave of artists with credit debt and young professionals with expensive pets. Imagining their next move, on express trains to office jobs, mourning LITERATURE their Collingwood homes. Still believing that neo-liberalism could be stopped by housing co-ops on eco-friendly land trusts. As I saw Lisa Bellear’s image selling meticulously detailed finishes. A Blak poet used in an architectural marketing campaign where boutique apartments & IDEAS bred through Fitzroy lanes while a grey-haired property developer in a turquoise suit pulled all the capital. And Courtney Barnett sung about the sadness of it all before our High Street local wrapped herself in Jimmy Fallon’s arms. Grammy awards, world tours, an appearance on the Ellen Show. She did something with her languid drawl but I rarely see her in Preston anymore.

2. They said money helps In time I had a little cash running shamanic healing sessions for out-of- work actors and corporate litigators. Spiritual power for a $1000 an hour in New York City, living with the Kumeyaay Nation poet Tommy Pico in our Brooklyn brownstone. Scribbling frantically in our Moleskines between shifts searching for answers to the string of emails excavating heritage for settler needs and the glow of our phones sending messages 21 – 23 FEBRUARY from curious men. Not knowing what any of it meant just Blak land/white UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA concepts/no answers.

Supported by The University of Western Australia, Bupa, PAV Events, The Westin, University Club of Western Australia, Boffins Books, The Guardian, LitQuake, City of Vincent, Copyright Agency, Creative New Zealand International Promotional Fund for Literature and Vision Australia Radio 13 | Timmah Ball Dear urban Aboriginal, laughing at the stark slick art on crisp gallery walls. Clinging to the hope that our words might mean something more. We lie on rooftops unable I am an editor for The Australian Architect magazine. I heard to sleep and Tommy laughs when I tell him that white writers write about you speak about Indigenous knowledge at the MPavillion last the Merri creek, idealising pre-colonial Melbourne by calling it Naarm/ year. Would you be interested in writing an article? I thought Birrarung-Ga. They write of the long grass, lizards and birds before John you would be perfect. Batman arrived like they were there first, because they belong there?

Dear urban Aboriginal, 4. Are we tourists? Tommy mentions the American kids who see the falls and dead girls from I hope this finds you well. I am writing to invite you to present Twin Peaks. Carnal longing in Snoqualmie on summer road trips via post- a talk at the National Gallery. We would be delighted if you Nirvana Seattle nostalgia. While quiet histories of Salish Native Peoples were interested in this opportunity to participate. Given you’re pass softly through the streets. Because catching a glimpse of a native on of Ballardong Noongar descent, you would bring an important TV is better than the real thing. And you can ignore the kid from public perspective to the discussion. housing or the social worker from the Tribal Land Council. And we both know they thought it was impressive that an Indian even had a role on Dear urban Aboriginal, primetime TV. Didn’t know natives had jobs too. While we watched Deputy Chief Tommy ‘Hawk’ Hill talk Blackfoot Indian mysticism to I called you earlier today, hoping to have a brief chat about Special Agent Cooper as Lucy asked Hawk about his heritage with that Point Grey. We are planning on entering a design competition nauseating ignorance that’s still so familiar. for the site, and want to explore Indigenous placemaking in the Tommy and I visit the Great Northern or Salish Lodge, all Oakwood broader Lorne region. We understand that speaking to someone fireplaces and views of the falls. We’re looking for Agent Cooper, avoiding with knowledge of that area would be a great place to start. other road trippers in $30 motels. But a country club accent explains the cost of it all. Almost worth it for a balcony, patio, chaise lounge and the roar of Snoqualmie fall. The concierge carefully explains to us 3. What we do when we know the truth that it’s proudly Indian owned. Renewed access to fishing resources In NY men brawl and homeless crawl into strange urban crevices. Crowds accelerated the Muckleshoot Tribe into casino gaming on Reservations. walk swiftly; miss our gaze lured by fluorescent lights and discount sales. The Muckleshoot owns the hotel and he thinks he’s part of the tribe now. And Brooklyn means broken land where people don’t feel the ground. But With his sculptured quiff, tortoiseshell glasses and Native American men cruise bars in search of meat predators we’re fairly pleased to meet bosses. On the other side of town in our small motel room with brown as they catch our eye with a dirty smile. A mop of grey curls in tailored floral carpet and weathered curtains we listen to the falls and the call of trousers enters the gentrified Bushwick local. Leans in carelessly with poker machines. his expensive drink, tells us his sex life is like porn, repetitive, thin. He’s like ‘Where you from?’ Williamsburg. ‘No I mean where are you originally 5. Whose land is it anyway? from?’ Melbourne, San Diego. ‘No I mean where are your parents from?’ I stop writing about culture or connection to the land because I’m not that Melbourne, San Diego. ‘No I mean where are your exotic looks from?’ naïve and most mornings I wake up on the upper east. In a penthouse with Tommy starts to gently nibble his earlobe and I softly whisper, ‘We’re First a freshly pressed Wall Street broker lying on my chest. Wondering how Nations People, we’re not from anywhere. We always have and always will I’ll write about his silver cufflinks and taut physique in my confessional be here.’ In his white linen bed sheets, tangled, wet and meek, we call him sex novel while on the L train heading back home to Lorimer Street. But master because colonialism never had another option. on occasions the air is still and Mother Nature reveals herself to me again. On hot nights we walk the streets choking on pavement heat In a book written in English by a Waanyi woman who uses the master’s wondering how writers should be? Peering through Tribeca windows language better than he can. So I go back to Preston, no police arresting.

14 | Westerly online 15 | Timmah Ball Just Tommy and me eating overpriced eggs in repurposed warehouses Priest of Cheesy Fries Omar Sakr is an award-winning served salaciously by queer waiters. Barely noticing Courtney Barnett Omar Sakr bisexual Muslim poet from and Jen Cohler slip casually into the opposite seats, tight black jeans Western Sydney. His debut collection, These Wild Houses and leather jackets, low-fi rock via LA acclaim. Talking record deals (Cordite, 2017), was shortlisted with a new young hopeful they might be signing to their boutique label. for the Judith Wright Calanthe Because art is a well-placed selfie where de-colonial fantasies flood Award and the Kenneth Slessor online landscapes. And all across Instagram people are posting pictures Prize. His new book, The Lost of Great Southern Lands. Arabs (UQP, 2019), has been shortlisted for the John Bray Poetry Award.

I’m under familiar lights cheap shining on shitty tiles

Shoving the burger in my mouth fingers diamond with salt

The other night in the restaurant I saw lobster flirted with fancy

I can’t imagine eating something so rich not with this filthy

Body I’m haunted by all that I never had & never satisfied

With what I have a genesis in grease

Nobody stays in these eateries it’s why I keep returning

The food is forgettable & I am alone

Returning to loneliness can feel like family once you’ve known it

Long enough once you’ve fought it said you hate it & come

To love it Nobody looks at me here

Because nobody wants to be seen here o temple of invisibility

Fortress of saturated fats thank you for killing me

So slowly no one calls it harm.

16 | Westerly online 17 | Omar Sakr In-Laws Now hailing from the Wheatbelt of Western Australia, Tracy (first marriage) Ryan is the author of several Tracy Ryan chapbooks, five novels and nine full-length poetry collections, the most recent of which is The Water Bearer (Fremantle Press, 2018). She has been awarded the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award and her poetry has been shortlisted in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature.

Tongue on the plate He wasn’t ordained! I refuse to eat but this is a blot & that is the first they can’t get out the kindly sister of fine Swiss cloth never married a whole generation stayed with mother down the line. all her days. We’re on tolerance. Mother’s gone now Divorce! Remarriage! gone to glory. My wayward outlaw Here’s the other packed in a narrow younger sister bed upstairs and me lodged with God on a separate floor. to do his labour Her house all timber sidelong, spots my the scent of sap sleight of hand insists from rafters offloading the dead dispelling sleep. dismembered organ. The whole place aches. Everything noted, Outside, the Lake keyhole eyes. held back by fog Says we may visit swallows its loveliness but cover our shame: chaste as glass. arrive before dawn & leave after dark (Eidgenossen point & talk)

18 | Westerly online 19 | Tracy Ryan A Private Sermon Jay Anderson is a writer, editor of a yellow-streaked meth pipe—according to the employees of the Smile Jay Anderson and arts worker. He managed Dental Clinic, at least. Centre for Stories’ queer My family went to St Mary’s Church to worship, and my siblings and I storytelling project, Bright attended the adjoining Catholic primary school. Of the eighteen churches Lights, No City, and sits on their Board. He is currently in the town it was arguably the most striking, and had existed since researching rural queer Kalgoorlie was founded at the end of the 18th century with the auspicious studies at Curtin University discovery of more than three kilos of gold by the infallible Paddy Hannan. and has been published by Every Sunday morning my mother roused us for 8am mass. Kristen, Margaret River Press. Troy, Blake, Laine and I dragged our feet in protest. We pleaded with our keeper, every week, to let us spend a morning curled between the sheets of our beds, but to no avail: ‘Today is God’s day, and our day to worship him for all of his work,’ she commanded. When I was thirteen my dick belied my Catholic education. So, every week we piled into the minivan and wound our way through By then, I had undergone four of the seven sacraments: Baptism, the muted streets of the town until we arrived to join the other families of Reconcilliation, Holy Communion and Confirmation. I was bathed in holy sleepy children in their Sunday best, or what counted for it, out the front water in infancy, forgiven for my many confessed sins at the age of nine, of God’s sanctuary. consumed the body and blood of Jesus Christ during Year 4, and, finally, Red bricks rose to meet clouds; prodigious arched windows held a gained full membership to the Church with a reaffirmation of my faith on myriad of colours; soft sun-stained tiles peaked at an overbearing height; the cusp of puberty: a period of sparse upper-lip hair in which arousal potted plants stood guard at heaving doors. could be induced by the shifting direction of the wind. Inside, past rows and rows of wooden pews that lined white-washed I was simultaneously burdened with the weight of thousands of walls, a strip of Hollywood-red carpet led to the steps of the altar where years of religious scripture at a private school that refused to teach sex a gilded cross towered. Fans were mounted above the pews; in summer, education in a town with the World’s Tallest Bin. they circulated the red dust about the place and one, perpetually broken, In Kalgoorlie, you can fry an egg on the pavement during the peak of emitted a faint clicking noise. Below them, The Passion of Christ—a summer. In our science class at John Paul College, Mrs Murphy taught us dozen-some paintings that depicted Jesus’ crucifixion—reminded us of about heat conduction by demonstrating. And on that broiling day, our his sacrifice, and our corresponding fortune. Year 8 class felt the seconds trickle into minutes with the sweet and sour It was bloody beautiful, and there was a warmth there, developed and sticky sweat that gathered on our brows and between our thighs and through repetitious congregation and ritualistic practice. Even if my slid down the arches of our backs while the trees in the courtyard outside siblings and I hadn’t developed the shared conviction of parents and our classrom wept under the beat of an indignant sun. grandparents and priests and clergymen, we knew that we were part of a After you marvel at the sheer height of the forlorn waste cylinder community and we felt it. as it rises against the coral gum trees that climb around it, after you’ve But there were conditions. waited patiently for the sun-baked pavement to deliver breakfast while During mass, after we had all queued to eat the body of Christ, there sweat drips into your eyes, you become desperate to find something to was a moment of reflection—to give thanks for all that we were blessed fill the empty space. The space between Kalgoorlie, Coolgardie, Southern with. Before I was attuned to my sexual desire I used to pray to God and Cross, Merriden, Doodlakine, Meckering, Northam, Bakers Hill—and all thank him for my family, for friends, for arbitrary material possessions. the other small towns and the monuments to ghosts between the gaping When I was thirteen my thanks became pleas as it became obvious that pit we dug and Perth. The space between the dripping seconds. For many, it was the toned, near-naked body of Jesus Christ suspended above the religion becomes the something, and losing yourself by flitting between altar that had me harder than the floor we kneeled on, and not the tepid the thunderous pages of the Bible is better than losing yourself in the end gust of air from the click, click, click of the broken fan.

20 | Westerly online 21 | Jay Anderson At night, under my Holden duvet in the sanctity of my bedroom, blue-eyed progeny had attended and still attended Sunday Mass. At every the glow from my chunky laptop held Buddy Love and Ginger Lynn in offertory she fingered a crisp fifty-dollar note; when the baskets were pixelated sodomy. I worked tirelessly to follow Ginger but it was Buddy, passed among the pews, she was poised, ready to donate. Her milky eyes poised behind her, gasping in ecstasy after grunting and pushing himself seemed all-knowing, and I imagined that she was sent by God as part of an into her and out of her and into her, who got me off after I spent thirty inquisition that ended with my own crucifixion—with my sparsely-haired seconds tugging on my dick. Afterwards, I would lie there, a scrunched-up body suspended above the congregation of St Mary’s Church. piece of cum-sodden paper towel beside me, and an overwhelming One morning, at Mass, Mrs Hayes frowned at my anxiety-induced, unease would consume me until I fell asleep, exhausted. I would sink sweat-licked body. The crease where her silvered eyebrows met into and through my bed and wrap myself in layers of a star-speckled demanded of me: Catholic or dick hungry? I darted away from her, took sky while my dreams became porno. I was Ginger, laid out on amber silky my seat in my family’s pew, and stared at the dust-caked gaps between the sheets and velvet pillows, and Jesus was Buddy, and there was no fear or jarrah floorboards beneath me. That day, my prayers were delivered with shame, only pleasure and pain swirling together in rapture. But I would renewed vigour. My unbending dick would be brought to repent. wake up with sticky underwear and curse the Son of Morning. Mrs Hayes, with her silent asking, became the bane of my pubescent I bargained with the almighty figure residing in his cloud-space star- existence, a spectre to rival the likes of the purgatory-damned. I avoided kingdom to forgive my sin, and free me. In the glittering light from the her with vigour, kept my eyes on the feet that carried me along the cracked scintillating stained-glass windows of the church I squeezed my eyes shut pavement from my God-fearing parents, to my Religion class at school, and clasped my hands together. Tight. to Church. My thoughts were only of her, repreive offered only in the On the Monday following Sunday Mass I’d wake up convinced that moments I fell into the porn sets on my computer screen, let myself find God had touched me with his microwave fingers, but, again and again, I’d my body, and other mens bodies. But I repented, every Sunday. I asked find myself with a bottle of lotion and a few sheets of paper towel, flitting God, and asked him again and again to send me a sign: a burning bush, between Buddy and Ginger out of guilt but only interested in the curls of glossolalia, a levitating dildo. Buddy’s chest hair and the curve of his dick. You only have to ask to receive, after all. During Mass, I watched the warm weather cede to autumn winds and So at night God’s hand led me to broad-shouldered priests and the the fans gather dust. Inside hallowed halls there was no breeze to blame discerning men of the Church cumming on each other in Biblical euphoria so I took to singing with my community. They sung loud, loud, loud—so under the blessed gaze of Jesus on poorly constructed porn sets; in that they could fill the empty space—and I sung loud, loud, loud to confessional booths, young, lithe men admitted their desire for other empty myself. men to Priests who dismissed their pleas and took them in—in their hands But Jesus was a hottie, and my erections during the Word of God with enthusiasm, with their mouths between breaths, and into them with proved it. heaving pants. So, I’d clench my hands into fists with such force that, if I hadn’t Buddy Love became unappealing, and when I thought of Mrs Hayes’ compulsively chewed my nails beyond their beds, they would have bled demanding eyebrows and my crucifixion I imagined my naked body me. Gaping holes in my hands like God’s only son himself. above the altar and reveled in my conviction that the other boys of Paranoia set in and I was convinced others in the congregation knew— our congregation would enjoy me above them during the liturgy and could see my eyes wandering to Jesus’ body pinned above the altar when contemplate the spurt of the clicking fan. I thought of the men in the I should have been listening to the Priest’s homily, responding to the Kyrie, congregation coming to the Church after-hours to be with other men. Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. I thought of Jesus and got guilt-free hard. Glory to God in the highest, the Priest sung half-heartedly. And peace to At some point, I saw those ethereal all-knowing eyes and silver brows his people on Earth, the congregation chanted in unison, while I mumbled at Church and I didn’t stare at the floor. behind them. I met her with my own knowing. I was convinced that, in particular, Mrs Hayes knew. The matriarch of the A dick-hungry Catholic, Mrs Hayes. large, best-known family in Kalgoorlie; generations of her blonde-haired,

22 | Westerly online 23 | Jay Anderson Amebo Chiké Frankie Edozien is the She was a gossip. author of Lives of Great Men: Or, the power of the editor and the Or at least that’s how my pre-teen mind saw her. And till tomorrow Living and Loving as an African many Nigerians of my generation, and the one before, will derisively inspiration of the unicorn Gay Man (Team Angelica brandish those who they feel can’t keep their traps shut as ‘Amebo’. Chiké Frankie Edozien Publishing, 2017), a Lambda Literary Award winner for I was fascinated with the drama playing out each week on screen. Memoir/Biography. He is the Just as I grew more and more drawn to the drama in the pages of the director of New York newspapers that my father brought home from work most weekdays. University Accra. When my brothers were playing soccer on the field in the compound, I, the youngest one, an asthmatic, buried my face in newspapers.

Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Sometime between 1981–86. And then between 1986–89 Lagos, Nigeria. Sometime around the Second World Black and African Well, boarding school at age eleven is not the freedom from tyranny my Festival of Arts and Culture little head imagined. There once was a popular soap opera called The Village Headmaster. It Everyone is my senior. aired weekly on television sets all over Nigeria in the late 1970s. It made Everyone can punish me. millions howl with laughter. It was appointment viewing in those heady It seems everyone does punish me. days just before and after FESTAC ’77, before Nigerian movies made Older boys gobble my provisions before the next Visiting Day. For that in Nollywood exploded and sucked up all the onscreen entertainment matter, I may not even get my mother or any visitor the next Visiting Day. in Africa. I have to fetch buckets of water to bathe and the toilets, well, they are I quite recall sitting to watch on the floor in our living room at 27 Lugard holes in the ground. They are just the pits. To use them I have to squat. Avenue, in Ikoyi. That small TV was black and white. Back then Ikoyi was And dodge accidents. mostly residential. And bucolic. And, compared to now, it seemed sparse. At dawn it’s morning jogging, then bathing, then breakfast then class There was little traffic on its narrow streets and the large trees provided then lunch, then siesta, then afternoon prep (study time) then dinner, then shade to pedestrians. night prep, then lights out. Rinse and repeat, weekday in and weekday out. A lot of families who lived there were civil servants, and our home Get me out of here! was just steps away from the Public Works Department. A sprinkling of But then, two years in, something changes. expatriate families, diplomats and the like, with cars that had red license I’m no longer in the most junior class. This peculiar Federal Government plates, also lived in the area. But their kids went to even more posh private College (high schools are called colleges here and, in this era, boarding schools than Home Science. At breaktime all the pupils of Home Science schools are tony) feels like home away from home. I’ve bonded with some Association School on Ruxton Road would spill out into the courtyard and classmates and unbeknownst to me am making lifelong friendships. I’ve dish. It was all about what we saw on television the night before. blossomed and I’m blossoming into a sometimes smiley, sometimes surly ‘Did you see so and so do such and such on Village Headmaster teen with opinions. I have things to share about the big wide world out last night?’ there—after all, I’ve been on holiday twice to London for ‘summer’. And at ‘Ehn hen. Did you see when Amebo said… Chai!’ least two rich kids bumped into me and my family as we shopped at Brent The character of ‘Amebo’, ably played by Ibidun Allison, was at once Cross Shopping Centre, so I’m now cool. harmless and corrosive. A purveyor of information, an embellisher of But I want to tell stories. But I’m no ‘Amebo’. My stories will be truth, she oozed innocence and insouciance. She was simply the village different. They will help us get things from the principal and his team of character who sold you palm wine and dropped gist to go with it. A town tyrannical teachers. They will inform us. So just like the stories from the crier wailing information most wanted to keep private. And yet she newspapers, I begin to write and present stories for the Press Club at the couldn’t help herself; she always had to share. And share. And share. school assembly.

24 | Westerly online 25 | Chiké Frankie Edozien Am I gossiping when I talk about a teacher who recently got married It’s mindless work but I can do it at night and go to class in the daytime. and changed her name? Or about the septic tank that has never really I go see Afrobeat mega-star Fela Anikulapo-Kuti in concert at a New York worked and which school authorities ignore? No! I’m just doing my work City venue and the Syracuse chapter is over. I pack my bags soon after. as a press person! Since I’m no good at sports and have not much to do for the Inter-House New York, New York. The 2000s till… sports or school sports outings, I can go as a press club member and write The city so great they had to name it twice. It is full of possibility. And has something for the bulletin. I’m now a senior and several regional boarding pockets of blackness in all its brilliant glory. schools have been grouped for competition. I’m home. Calabar. It has pockets of gay people in all their brilliant, rainbow glory. Abuloma. I’m home. Ikot Ekpene. ‘Come Closer,’ the tall bespectacled one with the long cassock says Port Harcourt. loudly, arms outstretched. Owerri. This man is a Catholic priest speaking from the altar of his gorgeous There is no way I’m going to miss the regional CAIPO games as a gargantuan Jesuit parish in Manhattan. He’s asking the gay men and participant. It’s a badge of honor. And since I live for the drama, I sign up women to move right up to the front as this house, that is God’s house, is for the drama club. theirs too. I shine on the stage. I’m home. No. Actually I dazzle. I am a writer. Not an actor anymore. But I’m a journalist, recounting I come home a winner. and retelling stories for newspaper articles. I make a living. I battle And then high school is over and those pesky exams get in the way with editors who I believe have an ‘anti’ agenda. I wonder if their sole but, somehow, I end up at the University of Port Harcourt dancing and raison d’etre is to demonise people like me in print. But at this tabloid, prancing my way on stage at ‘The Crab’ theatre. I’m in the Theatre Arts with a circulation close to 700,000 readers daily and a very influential degree program. I’m acting at school and auditioning back home in Lagos. readership, I see firsthand the power of having my stories published. I’m actually getting bit parts on nighttime shows. I write about us. I write about them. I write about the powerful and the I’m an actor. I’m a writer. I am nineteen years old. I am broke. downtrodden. I battle with editors who never seem to understand us. Nigeria is bleak. Economic troubles. Military dictatorships. Everyone In down times, of which there are many, books save me. I face my who can check out, checks out. I have no plans to, but when I go on a demons by taking responsibility and delving into more books. I enjoy long-promised holiday to America, I don’t bother going back. Broadway A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson, and swear by it even though beckons. I am an actor. I am a writer. After all. my friends think she’s kooky. Years pass. I amass a body of work. I’m proud of the changes I’ve made Syracuse, New York, USA. Sometime in the 1990s through my journalism. Being broke in Syracuse is humiliating. I am a writer. ‘You have an accent.’ And now, I’m a teacher too. I understand that context matters in all ‘Where are you from?’ stories and I try to get my students to never forget that. ‘You African aren’t you?’ I put down my Broadway dreams and I do well in school. I’ll never get Accra, Ghana. 2008. Then sometime in 2014. Or maybe even 2015 any roles on stage with this accent. But I’ll write well. I hope. It’s cold. It’s Travelling through Africa, I see that state sponsored homophobia is all horrible being a janitor. It’s better being a phone operator. the rage in some countries. I see that religious zealotry is driving policy AT&T may I help you? makers and influencers blind. If only they knew. I am a writer. So I write more magazine articles. More journalism. It’s not enough. It seems to have little impact.

26 | Westerly online 27 | Chiké Frankie Edozien ‘Kill the journalist. Write about you.’ And then when John R. Gordon, who edited my memoir, came into my That’s the counsel from my dear ‘broda’, Binyavanga Wainaina. Advice world with his meticulous and insightful thoughts and ideas, I am already he wails at me in New York too when he’s visiting the Big Apple and we are used to looking deeper, digging deeper, and am open to ways to get my having a nice dinner at CookShop, a bustling restaurant in Manhattan’s copy even more sparkling in its honesty. Chelsea that is full of beautiful people. All of them skinny. The Bronx, New York, USA. Autumn 2019 All of them in dressed like they are off to a fashion magazine I am a writer. photoshoot. We sip wine and take it all in. Imperfect yes. But striving and capable of soaring higher than I’d He is a writer. ever imagined, and all the while nurtured by a family of contemporary A memoirist. African writers-cum-journalists and editors whose general excellence I A storyteller. glean from: Chris Abani, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Maaza Mengiste, He’s celebrated. And he’s talented, yes, but he’s also just brilliant. When Lola Shoneyin, Zukiswa Wanner, Mona El-tahawy, Diriye Osman, Kinna he visits me in Ghana and tells me about his essays and new book as he Likimani, Nii Ayikwei Parkes, Sulaiman Addonia, Sisonke Msimang, makes fun of my fuzzy relationships, he says some version of ‘write about Abubakar Adam Ibrahim and Leye Adenle to name a few. If you don’t you’. When you write about you, you can give context, it seems. You can know them, don’t gloss over their names. Find their work and bask in have an opinion. their literary glory. Do it as a favour to me but, really, you’d simply be So I look inward. Maybe I’m interesting enough to have a story worth treating yourself. sharing? I write about growing up and falling in love with a man in Lagos Tamale, Ghana. Winter 2019 who doesn’t have the courage to buck the system, so he gets married I am a writer. to some girl. The work is published in an anthology. The editor is I’ll continue to shine a light on stories some choose to ignore. With the Ellah Wakatama, OBE. The anthology is Safe House: Explorations in thousands of visitors flocking to Ghana to mark the 400th anniversary Creative Nonfiction. since enslaved Africans arrived in America from these coasts, many of Ellah’s a unicorn. the stories have been about the horrors of the dungeons and the slave Ellah sees me. ships. The world had never seen anything like it. The majority of these She gets my stories. She needs little explanation or justification. visitors don’t stray far from the coastal areas. Ellah calls me on my shit. And its all done without a scintilla of But I write about places the captives were taken from, places the slave humiliation. She doesn’t buy my varnished rosy picture of getting traders never visited, close to the Sahara. Hundreds of miles away. I show de-flowered at sixteen by an eighteen-year buddy who’s now a preacher- how far their tentacles turned communities against each other and the man. Her notes as she edits allow my writing to be truth. living scars of places whose residents never saw the sea before they were Ellah is a magnificent unicorn. Or perhaps I’ve never had a good editor taken there. I tell the story of a horror trail often ignored. I give them until now? Perhaps I’m only just becoming a writer now? their due. Years later, she edits a different project based on fear. The light touch I am a writer. is still there. Well, the touch. Heavy when it needs to be and light when it An acting life may or may not have afforded me this joy. needs to be. It’s a joy and I’m constantly learning not just about craft, but I have some ways to go. about life. I hope to become a better memoirist too. How did it come to be that in trying to do my best work I found a unicorn walking among us? I don’t block the blessing but embrace it. The lessons help me with other pieces and other editors, like the incomparable Sunila Galappatti.

28 | Westerly online 29 | Chiké Frankie Edozien Of Snowballs and Survival Marie O’Rourke recently 1907. Istrian peninsula, modern day Croatia. A woman farewells the man Marie O’Rourke completed a PhD at Curtin she loves. Heading to the great unknown of America, Anton Crnac plans University, exploring the to build a new and better life, earn enough for wife and baby to follow. multiplicity and mutability of He’s soon cutting trees in Oregon, carving a future for his young the essay genre, memory and identity. Marie’s creative and family—passenger manifests, census papers, tell me so. Across continents critical work has been published and oceans, Katerina waits. And she waits. Not until 1918, with now in Mediating Memory: Tracing eleven-year-old daughter, Maria, by her side, does Katerina receive news the Limits of Memoir (Routledge, of her husband’s death: in an instant, the slip of a wire, a steam engine, 2017), a/b, ABR, Axon, Meniscus, brought Anton’s life and a family’s dreams to an end. Did the accident New Writing, TEXT and Westerly. happen two years ago or ten? No one can tell her. I scour the internet, looking for clues. But strangely, having blazed a paper trail from Istria to New York to Oregon, Anton Crnac’s death Their story starts with a snowball. Lots of snowballs, actually. Snowballs cannot be found. That is, it cannot be found at the time, or under the Nonno Antonio threw at Nonna Maria when they were young, growing up circumstances in which it was supposed to have happened. Ancestry. in the same village. com’s Anton lives on to the age of almost eighty. He marries another ‘That’s how I knew he liked me,’ Nonna scoffed, corners of her eyes woman, has four children. softly creasing. I know that migration was expensive, that men went ahead because Nonno’s returned smile was broad; his voice, too, in some way only they could get the work, the pay, needed to save for their loved ones’ expanded. ‘She was the only one I ever wanted.’ fares. I know time and distance put strain on those relationships, and A swat of Nonna’s hand, a coy smile, might follow. ‘Pfft, Antonio.’ it was common for arrangements and promises to be broken, for many She wasn’t a demonstrative person—Nonno sought our cuddles more different reasons. But as I trace this particular man across various screens often than she. But in that brief and easy reminiscence played out over and pages—as possibilities become probabilities—it weighs heavily on and over again—in the way they offered details to one another, and to my mind. I think of Katerina, left, literally, holding the baby, immobilised us, with the same generosity they dealt out our favourite foods—I was by poverty and the fact of her sex, while Anton seemingly starts anew, gifted more than the circumstances of my grandparents’ youth and early gathering spouse, offspring, property, as he moves across the American courtship. They gave me a bigger story: one of affection and connection map. Did this same man send word of his ‘death’ back to Račja Vas? I I never saw or sensed between my warring parents at home; didn’t hear ponder the euphemisms one might use for such an act: perhaps ‘tidying when Nanna Robertson talked about her late husband through tight, thin up loose ends’, or ‘saving face’. lips, in a tight, thin voice. Does it matter, does it make any material difference, whether my great- A married couple loving each other doesn’t sound extraordinary, yet grandfather’s death was a lie? Some might say it would be kinder on his I’ve basked in the radiant warmth of that snowball story all my life. When family than simply telling them he was caught up in a new love, a new life, young, the narrative of Nonna and Nonno’s romance seemed to me as that didn’t have any room for them. All Katerina really needed to know beautifully mysterious as the loaves and fishes of our scripture lessons. was that Anton would never be coming back to the village. That she and Now, decades later, and mourning my own marriage’s demise, I find Maria would never be given the chance to leave it. myself looking, again, to the sustenance their history offers. For those Yet I know from talking to Nonna and Uncle Tony that my great- meagre handfuls of compacted snow began a love that could survive grandmother never recovered from the shock of this loss. That she separation of more than thirteen years and nearly 14,000 kilometres; a was, from this point, sickly and sad, or, in Nonna’s carefully chosen and love which then kept growing for a half-century more. weighted words, ‘very delicate’. I also know how that ‘delicacy’ then constrained and complicated my own grandmother’s life. • • • Anatomy is destiny, Freud famously declared, and in this family of gaps and silences, history repeats in uncomfortable ways. Fast forward to 1926,

30 | Westerly online 31 | Marie O’Rourke and another man is leaving his homeland and Maria behind. This time it’s that can be saved if a man is prepared to work hard. Most have left loved her snowball-throwing sweetheart, Antonio Medica, promising he will call ones behind. her to him. He, too, will be cutting trees. In Australia. Timber for gold, to Some of their stories must frighten Antonio. Like that of Andrea Mosotti, feed the furnaces of Kalgoorlie’s mines. run over by the rail trucks trying to get a stubborn horse and fallen wood Maria must be thinking of the Papa she never met: she knows tree- clear of the tracks. Both legs smashed, he had to ride five miles back to felling can be a deadly business; knows—has lived—the misery and main camp on the side of an engine, only horse reins to stop the bleeding. loneliness of one waiting for good news that never comes. How can she With no first aid in either camp—aside from a few bandages and some exist with her heart on the other side of the world? Neither yet knows iodine—Mosotti spent another hour waiting for an engine to get up enough that a third person has joined the equation, is quietly growing, will soon steam to take him on to the waiting ambulance at Kamballic. He died soon make his presence felt. Cannot know the hard road Maria will walk for this after arriving at Kalgoorlie Government Hospital. child, whom she will christen Tony, to keep the memory of her beloved On that train travelling to the middle of nowhere, in a land that Antonio alive. looks nothing like the one he’s known, I hope Antonio is thinking of the What will she do? How will she survive? When all’s said and done, promises he’s made to Maria, thinking of the love they share. And praying Maria has no choice: the snowballs, that smile, and the body they came to God to keep him safe. from, have claimed her as theirs for life. Like her mother—like countless • • • women before and after—she will be forced to live on little more than faith and hope and trust. For twenty years, Nonno Antonio was an employee of the West Australian Goldfields Firewood Supply (WAGFS). Set up in the early 1900s to provide • • • fuel for the goldmines, the Kurrawang operation was based near the Antonio Medica, son of Ivan Medica and Elena Poropat, boards the R.M.S. outskirts of Kalgoorlie, but most employees lived in makeshift camps at Ormuz in Naples, on 15 August 1926. Aged just nineteen, he leaves behind ‘the head of the line’. Workers and their families moved further from Kal his mother, half-siblings and sweetheart, Maria Crnac, to make a life for and town comforts the more acres they cleared: supplies were delivered the two of them on the other side of the world. Three weeks later, on by rail two or three times a week, but with no refrigeration, meat often September 8th, he arrives in his new antipodean home. arrived fly-blown. Antonio’s circumstances are nothing special or unusual: he is just This was my nonno’s Australia for many years, working with mostly one of 4,717 male migrants from Italy and surrounds to arrive on West Italians and Slavs to strip the landscape of timber so dense it would often Australian shores that year. Leaving poor rural communities, fleeing split or chip the axe head. Each tree feller cleared around three and a half countries gripped in the post-World War I tussle for land and power, they tons of wood per day, under appalling conditions: a sub-tropical desert, are all flocking to the new ‘working man’s paradise’ of the Commonwealth daily temperatures hovered in the mid-forties over summer, might drop of Australia. below zero in winter. Hours were long, rates of pay were low, with no Like so many of his northern European migrant contemporaries, overtime or holidays, no workers’ compensation, no injury safety net. Antonio’s ‘working paradise’ is to be found in the West Australian bush. Yet even within the men of the woodline, there were some whose job He barely has time to take in Fremantle before he’s on the train, heading was more backbreaking than most. for Kalgoorlie. One night in a boarding house in Kal, then another train, The guys who worked the hardest were the blokes who loaded heading out of Kurrawang camp to what will be his new world. the wood into the railway trucks. They loaded forty tons of I seat myself beside him on that grueling journey. Antonio can only wood every day and that was hard work, whereas swinging understand a little English, so must be relieved to find himself surrounded an axe you could, at least, sit under a tree and get your breath by other Slavs and Italians, men who swap histories and guess at the back whereas with loading, you were out in the open all the future the camp holds. Many have relatives who made this journey before time and what with the heat of the trucks, etc. it must have them—brothers, cousins, uncles who have sent word about the money been hard. (Bunbury 105)

32 | Westerly online 33 | Marie O’Rourke I read Mario Battaglia’s praise for these wood loaders with a mix of His mouth waters at the smell of the sweet ‘pony bread’ just out of the interest, sadness and respect. For census papers have informed me oven, ready for their trip. He hears Nonna Katerina crying, and Mama Nonno was one of those men. gently pleading. • • • • • • Yes, life on the woodlines for Antonio was hard. But while he worked and I can’t imagine how Katerina would have felt, February 1939, saying saved, back in Račja Vas, I suspect Maria’s life was harder. goodbye to her only child, Maria, and grandson Tony, with whom she had The Crnac family’s holding was a meagre piece of land that yielded shared every day from the time he was born. Can’t imagine what sort of little, despite Maria and Katerina’s farming efforts. Struggling to support future she saw for herself. her own mama and child, Maria was forced to do the work of a man—for Actually, I can imagine. My heart, as a mother, can feel the wrench. half the pay. Roughly five lira a day to carry bags of coal on her back The misery. But it can also sense the overriding hope that your child will between villages, or lug water to regional road workers. have all that you have lacked; be spared the pain you’ve endured. The An unmarried mother, Nonna also carried the extra burden of the assurance that if they are safe and happy, that will be enough for you. village’s scorn and disapproval. Though I suspect this was, for her, sadly • • • nothing new. A female in a fiercely patriarchal culture, she’d never had a father, money or land to speak of: nothing which might give her social Maria and her son finally arrive in Fremantle on the 14th of March. The currency. Maria had only love—for Antonio, son Tony, mother Katerina— sea journey is a lonely one for Tony. Wiped out by seasickness, Maria and a determination to do anything for them. spends most of the voyage in bed or vomiting. No longer a single man in the eyes of WAGFS, the arrival of his wife • • • and child would have meant Antonio slept in more than a tent for the first A boy lies in bed, cold and tired; rubs rough hands up and down his arms, time in thirteen years. Married quarters were still very basic but more craving the warmth of friction. Tony’s been chopping the family firewood. substantial: bush timber structures, hessian covered and whitewashed Man of the house since he was four years old, he needs to look after Mama with a corrugated iron roof. Comprising of two bedrooms and a ‘kitchen’, and Nonna Katerina as best he can. these were harder to move than a tent, but could still be put on floats and A snowflake finds its way through the crack in the roof, flutters down transported to the next area as needed. and lands on his face. So cold. Hungry too. Beans, cabbage and a little Accustomed to living off the land, most residents tried to grow a little barley aren’t enough to fill Tony up these days. He hears his stomach something. The constant relocation made it impossible to establish a rumble and silently curses that old cow of theirs that died of foot and garden, so Maria and Antonio cultivated basil, parsley, tomatoes and mouth, taking away even his drink of milk. chicory in half drums to make them moveable. They even managed to Still, he’s too excited to sleep. Tomorrow they’re leaving Račja Vas. keep a few chooks too. Uncle Ivan is travelling with him and Mama on the train, all the way to Cooking with no more than a camp oven and a billy, battling to keep Napoli. There, they’ll get on the boat that will take them to the other side the ever-present red dust at bay, was a challenge for Maria and the other of the world. wives. But, in Europe, a woman whose husband had already gone on to Australia. Tony can’t imagine what it will be like there. He’s never been Australia was the key farm worker. At least now they didn’t have to go out further than Rijeka. and dig or rake stony fields. Life on the woodlines was easy compared to Papa doesn’t usually send letters, just money when he can. Tony’s that. ‘A Roman holiday!’ in Uncle Tony’s words. looking forward to meeting Papa for the first time—Mama says he looks When Nonna talked about life at Lakewood camp I heard a little about like him. It’s exciting, but a bit strange too. All his life it has been Mama, the heat, the red dust and the flies; about the mornings when she woke to Nonna and him. Now he will live with just Mama and Papa. Nonna is find everything hard with frost. But I heard more about the friendships. staying behind. How everyone would gather at night to sit, talk, play cards and sing.

34 | Westerly online 35 | Marie O’Rourke It took time for Uncle Tony to get used to having a father around: to no be a Medizza—because the Italian language needs ‘zz’ rather than ‘c’ to longer be ‘man of the house’, and to share his mama’s attention with another. make the same sound? To find that your father, Ivan, will now forever be Together at last, Maria and Antonio would soon welcome another son (my recorded as Giovanni? father), and then a daughter into their world. With food in their bellies Did it bother Nonno Antonio as much as it outrages me now? Living and a support network of friends, they saw for themselves a rosy future. in the borderland where three countries met, identities of the residents Still, Tony couldn’t help thinking of Nonna Katerina, all alone on the of Račja Vas were fluid, and as each nation struggled to assert their other side of the world. Couldn’t help wondering—worrying—who’d be supremacy, boundaries would shift and slide. When my maternal chopping firewood for her now. great-grandfather, Anton Crnac, left home in 1907, he was Austrian. Nineteen years later my grandfather, Antonio Medica, was Italian. • • • When Uncle Tony’s future wife, Nevija, left the same village in 1950, she I always knew that my nonna and nonno married by proxy, after Tony was Jugoslavian. was born: Nonna was surprisingly frank about the physicality of her The slip of a bureaucratic hand no doubt saw many other identities relationship with Nonno, unapologetic that sex had begun before disappear: how could they be expected to get those strange foreign names marriage, and was enjoyed well into their seventies. I always knew that correct? Nonna Maria’s father appears as Cernac, Cernay, Crnz, Cezna, their wedding ‘ceremony’ took place while Maria and Antonio were on Cerne and Cernae in the American documents I track down. At least, opposite sides of the globe. What I didn’t realise was that this marriage I think that’s him. No one can tell me for sure. didn’t take place until 1937, eleven years after they had parted. • • • With barely functional literacy, I appreciate their communications were limited. But seeing that Nonno still lists himself as single in his 1934 Migrate. Two small syllables which describe one enormous leap of faith. application for naturalisation rattles my faith in their snowball story. If Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb meaning to, ‘Move to Antonio always intended to marry Maria, why didn’t he acknowledge a new area or country in order to find work or better living conditions’, it sooner? there is much that this deceptively simple definition hides. You can read That is a question the powers-that-be ask in 1939, when, having married the statistics and see how many made that leap. But you can’t see the pain Maria, Antonio asks the government to legitimise Tony. Why, when he that being uprooted from your past, your family, everything familiar, must applied for Maria’s admission to Australia, did he not state that he had any cause. Can’t see the misery which motivates, or perhaps necessitates, that dependent children? Can it be that something was just lost in translation? upheaval. The answer can never be known. But the end result was that the Nonna always told me that life in ‘the old country’ was hard. I knew Australian government refused to acknowledge Tony as Antonio’s son. her family were poor and that she was cooking, cleaning, working in the Although he was the legitimate child of a naturalised British subject, fields from an early age, doing whatever was needed to help and support when Mussolini struck a deal with Hitler and World War II broke out, her widowed mother. Her calf even bore a scar where she was shot as a this adolescent boy was suddenly an alien. Unfortunate and more than teenager, caught in the act of running sugar on the black market. That scar a little ironic, given that the Medica family never would have called entranced me as a child, and I always thought the story was a bit of exotic themselves Italian. excitement. Now, I think of the desperation that would force a young girl For of the 4,717 men who left Italy to migrate to WA in 1926, Nonno to make that trek to Pula—roughly seventeen hours on foot. I think of the Antonio was one of nearly 3,500 of those ‘Italians’ who identified as panic she must have felt when that policeman opened fire. members of the Jugo-Slav race. His passport declared him to be Italian, I was always a little confused by Nonna’s lack of nostalgia for her but, to get this document, Antonio’s family tree had simply been pruned homeland, but I’m beginning to understand why she never wanted to look to suit the ruling government’s requirements. Both his surname and the back. Australia was good to her and Antonio—to her and Nonno. Those Christian name of his father were changed. years of isolation and hard work in the Goldfields set them up for life, How would it feel to have your identity, your family heritage obliterated and, by the end of World War II, they were in a position to buy a large so easily? To find that you’re not allowed to be a Medica now—you must acreage in Perth, establishing a family home and market garden. They

36 | Westerly online 37 | Marie O’Rourke were never what you could call wealthy, but lived well into their eighties Theatre Zainab Zahra Syed’s in comfort and security, knowing none of their family would ever be cold Zainab Zahra Syed scholarship and poetry focuses or hungry again. on the Middle East and South Asia, with a focus on humanised • • • politics and reclaiming narratives. She has performed My ancestors were humble people. Left few marks on the historical and taught workshops across record. Haunted by unanswered questions, I long to sit down to lunch one the world. A Brown University last time, where, over a feast of gnocchi, under the watchful eye of Jesus graduate, and co-founder of and his apostles sharing their last supper, I might ask for more names, Pakistan Poetry Slam, she dates and details. Perhaps, too, Nonna and Nonno’s recipe for happiness. currently works as a producer at Performing Lines WA. But those have been taken to the grave, and that dining room is no more, bulldozed many years ago to make way for the double-storey monstrosity that is another family’s dream. On 8th July 2009, Master Sergeant Adam Marshall* was killed in I’ve never experienced proper snow, though we chanced on a sudden Afghanistan, during Operation Enduring Freedom, three days before he was fall once during a family holiday. Driving the two-hour detour to see it, we to return home. anxiously wondered aloud how this might compare to the ‘real thing’ we’d seen in countless movies, or imagined from the pages of books. Today we will invite you to the theatre I remember the five of us giggling with excitement—and a little awe— to watch a show with no title, when we stepped out into the magic of snowflakes flurrying through ask you to dress well & air. I remember my husband whooping louder than the kids as they all bring flowers for the performers. hurtled down the sled run. I remember laughing as we scrounged with This show has been been years in the making. numb hands for twigs, determined to find perfect arms, nose and mouth No one will want to miss this performance. for our snowman. There are no fire escapes in the auditorium. Photos of the day show faces with wide, easy smiles. Kids happily The director will be back stage, huddled into frame with Mum and Dad. Whatever that family may look you will not know who has orchestrated this production till the curtains close. like now, our happiness was real. I need to keep remembering that. And believing in the power of snowballs. The actors are interchangeable. They have been given one costume & clear instructions:

Sources You must go in at night. At night-time everything is more beautiful, Ancestry. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2013. Sourced at ancestry. com.au. It is easier to pull a trigger, Bunbury, Bill. Timber for Gold: Life on the Goldfields Woodlines. Fremantle: Fremantle in the morning you won’t remember Arts Centre Press, 1997. the earth is a few bodies lighter. ‘Kurrawang Woodline Fatality: Death of A. Mosotti.’ Western Argus, 26 January (1926): 20. Sourced at: trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/34312931. Faces are hard to forget, ‘MEDIZZA Antonio [Tony] [Arrived Fremantle 8 September 1926 Per Ormuz].’ Always come from behind. National Archives of Australia. Sourced at: recordsearch.naa.gov.au/ Do not look into their eyes, SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=1655668. they will make you weak. Wickens, Chas H. ‘Summary of Australian Population and Vital Statistics—1928 and Previous Years’. Australian Demography, 46 (1930). Sourced at: ausstats.abs.gov. This stage is not for the weak. au/ausstats/free.nsf/0/72CA92EAC0B92BCCCA25764D001D2C14/$File/31410_ No46_1928.pdf.

38 | Westerly online 39 | Zainab Zahra Syed Do not think. Now, his face sits amongst the New York Times edition of ‘Faces of the Dead: Just do. the men and women who gave their life to the cause of Enduring Freedom’. Never feel ashamed of holding a gun to someone’s head. He played the part of a successful execution. If you miss, Yet, you cannot frame the haunted grief of a family aim again. There is no such thing as a mistake. no rehearsal enough for how their hearts, Believe that. empty auditoriums, sit waiting for him at the curtain call We must deliver a worthy performance how, ten years later & it isn’t worthy if there is no blood. absence still clings to them like a bloody thing, Make blood. an echo lost somewhere in the resounding applause. Do not be gentle Be creative. & when the troops are ordered to pull out When there is blood everywhere Your uniform is your license to exercise a right. no one comes to clean up the mess. Your gun is your freedom of speech. The stage, strewn with flowers There will be no consequences, sits grave-like. until the curtains close & you find the stage a battle field (you wont know how you got there or why you enlisted in the first place. When the band stops playing the ringing will still play in your ears. You won’t remember the words of your anthem or how to place your hand over your chest). The audience will think this was all play after all, the war is too far away to be a staged thing. When Adam fell, no one even heard the sound of a gun but somewhere across the ocean his wife woke up with sweat down her forehead. They were high school sweet hearts, a backyard wedding two daughters & a son turkey, cranberry sauce & lots of pecan pie for Thanksgiving dinners & just last night, a phone call to promise he was coming home, this war was a sick joke, he wanted no part to play anymore. *Name changed to ensure the family’s privacy.

40 | Westerly online 41 | Zainab Zahra Syed Event Horizons Rafeif Ismail is an award- winning emerging multilingual Rafeif Ismail WA writer who aims to explore the themes of home, belonging and Australian identity in the 21st century as a third culture youth of the Sudanese diaspora. They are committed to creating diverse works and spaces.

exit wounds a body carries histories burn carries crater marks bleed carries the evolution of a nation and coalescing into a person fester and it’s in every heavy step on foreign soil and we are still falling in confused tongues days in fatigued cells and in missing years decades at home, the youth in the street scream peace after as bullets martyr their bodies it has been 18 years since i’ve been home and mothers try to resurrect bloody soil since i’ve felt at home what aftermath does a revolution bring i worry that i will return to a graveyard an exhausted body pulled apart in conflicting directions people have been replaced by headstones for so long before even reaching the event horizon that my hometown may be a ghost town long before i breathe its air again dulce et decorum est pro patria mori the philosophers say here is the thing about wars but we are still waiting to live they don’t end not with a grand announcement or in silence they drag, drag and drag until there is nothing left and the thing about wars is they never leave you

42 | Westerly online 43 | Rafeif Ismail ‘A History of Cutting Ahmed Yussuf is a writer and As the architect of the AFL’s Anzac Day match, Sheedy’s assertion off Its History’ journalist. He co-edited and that soccer is a foreign and ethnic sport is not only ahistorical but deeply curated Growing Up African in relevant to how the sport is perceived in Australia. It was in 1994 that The cycle of bitter new dawns Australia (Black Inc., 2019), the he moved to create the now well-established Anzac Day match between in Australian soccer first nonfiction anthology of Collingwood and Essendon. But in Mildura, on the banks of the Murray Ahmed Yussuf African-diaspora stories in Australia. His work has featured River, there were a group of men playing what was one of the most in Acclaim Magazine, Going popular games in the city in 1913. The game was soccer—though that game Down Swinging, The Guardian, was among the last the Irymple team would play together. TRT World and Jalada Africa.

In 2013, AFL legend Kevin Sheedy was sitting in a press conference as the Greater Western Sydney Giants’ coach when he asserted a long-held opinion about soccer in Australia, targeting the A-League’s Western Sydney Wanderers. ‘We don’t have the recruiting officer called the immigration department recruiting fans for the West Sydney Wanderers. We don’t have that on our side,’ Sheedy said (‘Kevin Sheedy Press Conference’). The inference being that soccer is foreign, ethnic and therefore un-Australian—otherwise there wouldn’t be any questions about the number of fans going to see Greater Western Sydney in the AFL.

The Argus, 30 June 1952. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article23192019

1913. Irymple Soccer Team, Mildura. https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/11232985

44 | Westerly online 45 | Ahmed Yussuf There are asterisks marked on this photo to show the five players on to a new era in Australian soccer. But with this rebirth began Australian the team who died in World War I. The image was discovered by soccer soccer’s one constant—the erasure of its own history. historian Dr Ian Syson, whose book The Game That Never Happened ‘Australian soccer has a history of cutting off its history, every new explores the impact of that war on the round-ball game in Australia. Syson generation denies the past, denies the reality of the past…the continental later found that more Mildura players died during the war: the number of European clubs developed mythologies that they started the game. They casualties was closer to nine or ten. didn’t start the game in Australia, of course they improved the game Mildura was not isolated in having soccer players travel to fight in tremendously, but they didn’t start it,’ Syson says. the war. Australian soccer, alongside rugby union, made a statement by Then, around the turn of the last century—just as soccer attempted stopping their competitions during the conflict, while rugby league and to move away from the idea of it being an ‘ethnic’ game—it was time Australian rules football continued their elite competitions. for another rebirth. The National Soccer League (NSL) was disbanded in favour of the A-League, and Soccer Australia was renamed Football Federation Australia. South Melbourne Hellas blogger Paul Mavroudis remembers the time of the shift well. He says, ‘Once the A-League happened it’s an absolutely clean break, and people sort of get blindsided by that bit of history.’ The move made him feel that the powers of the game thought there was nothing worth salvaging from the NSL era. He explains the extreme attitudes towards the erasure of history with the example of Perth Glory. ‘Perth Glory weren’t really encouraged or allowed to celebrate their tenth anniversary in the early days of the A-League. It was supposed to be a completely new team. There was supposed to be no history.’ But, at the same time—the early to mid-2000s—the fight for authenticity in Australian soccer was only just beginning. The internet was maturing, and dial-up was being phased out in favour of high-speed broadband, so the ‘epicentre’ of that contest, as Mavroudis puts it, became the now- defunct SBS World Game forum. ‘The World Game forum was the epicentre of the language, because you had everyone in Australian soccer contributing to this discussion,’ Mavroudis says. Soccer match at Gallipoli, 1915. Still from ‘World War 1: The Gallipoli The forum space was adversarial, and was, as Mavroudis explains, a Campaign 4/4’ (5:51) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KwQiokZumc ‘genuine free for all’. It was a place on the World Game website that was loosely moderated and largely uncensored. ‘I mean, if you were there, you were sort of waiting to get hammered. And you could hammer back. It The war deeply impacted the trajectory of soccer in Australia, and, was a genuine kind of libertarian nightmare, if you want to call it that,’ he according to Syson’s findings, led to the deaths of 500 players. Sheedy’s says. It was puzzling to Mavroudis that the forum existed as long as it did, ‘xenophobic’ comments and role in connecting sport and Anzac Day before it was shut down in 2010. cannot be divorced for Syson, who told me the attitude is ‘intimately ‘Certainly with the World Game forum it got to the point where it was so connected’ to the erasure of soccer’s role in Australian history. racist, homophobic and libelist, all sorts of things. Like the SBS eventually It wasn’t until after World War II that Australian soccer would be took it off the front page of the World Game site. And eventually shut it reborn, and the migration of Mediterranean European immigrants led down. I couldn’t believe it lasted as long as it did. The crap that was on

46 | Westerly online 47 | Ahmed Yussuf there, both good and bad, I couldn’t believe an official broadcaster had ‘There’s always groups that pop up, whether Ultras or just regular active, anything to do with that. It made no sense whatsoever.’ but most don’t last long. They don’t have any idea of the commitment it Soon after, the language that defines the Australian soccer fan came takes to follow a team at the suburban level,’ Mavroudis says. into existence. The culture was responding to itself, and the marketing of For fans like Mavroudis, the new dawner is tarred with the ire of a new horizon had left a bad taste for ‘old soccer’. It wasn’t helped by the market forces and capitalism, which are redefining community spaces words uttered at a Melbourne Victory function by an official, who said ‘the where soccer has always been a localised and communal experience. The days of wogball, and the pumpkin seed eaters are over’ (qtd. in Gorman change leaves the sport plastic, sanitised, manufactured and inauthentic, par. 22). and community clubs deserted in favour of franchises which are history- The new signifiers of fandom were on two diverging paths: the less and the plaything of marketing agencies. ‘new dawner’, who, as Mavroudis says, ‘is pejorative so you would say And the bitter suburban soccer fan has come to see their involvement somebody who is into the A-League, and has no idea of history, and in the game as the truest expression of fandom. They have disconnected despises what came before.’ from the plasticity of the game, but their conception of it, according to And the bitter, ‘who’s kind of stuck around from [the NSL]. Perhaps Syson, is just as ahistorical as the new dawner. He believes the game in someone like me who has no time for the A-League, the image it portrays Australia is in a constant battle with its past, and how it recognises it. is someone who is bitter, crusty, old, not with it anymore, miserable.’ ‘The game is always trying to say, brave new world, brave new world. On the terraces, the active support in Australian soccer often tries to Look at that we’re charging into the future, on the mistaken assumption co-opt the imagery and performance of continental Europe’s ‘ultras’ and that [its] chequered past drags us down…The bitters are people who Britain’s ‘casuals’—and, at times, the ‘clashing aesthetic ethos’ of the two long for a past that had a new dawn in it. We should do away with this fan cultures. Mavroudis says that ‘the British “casual” hooligans…go by not conception of new dawn,’ Syson says. Instead, he thinks the past must be wearing team colours,’ unlike the ultras, ‘[who] originate from continental embraced: ‘The chequered past is something to be celebrated, something Europe…They wear colours, often merchandise they’ve made themselves. to be proud of and something to give us a sense of belonging. [My radio] In that case, wearing colours can actually be dangerous, because you can show is named after a Bob Marley song, if you know your history, you then become a target.’ know where you’re coming from. But we don’t know where we’re coming Ultra means ‘beyond’ in Italian, and is used to describe organised from, we don’t know whether we belong, we don’t who we are.’ Australian groups of extreme support (Jones par. 2). The British casuals scene soccer is searching for itself in the future, but it dare not look back. The represents a subculture within British football that’s been tied to subcultures, the rebirths, the new dawns are all expressions of a sport hooliganism (Magee). However, the Australian adoption of these insecure of its place, longing for legitimacy. cultures is described by Mavroudis as a ‘pale imitation’. In contrast to the anti-establishment nature of these fan cultures, the A-League has been derided as a competition providing a corporatised and sanitised version Works Cited of the game. It’s something that Mavroudis can’t disconnect with the 1913. Irymple Soccer Team, Mildura. Mildura Rural City Council Library Service, 23 performance of the Australian ultra. Nov. 2005. https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/11232985. [Public Domain] ‘Here are all these thugs and heroes who want to protest and fight Gorman, Joe. ‘Just Another Page: 2007-2014’, The Death & Life of Australian Football. against and disrespect corporate football, but they support teams in the Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2017. https://books.google.com.au/ A-League, one of the most corporate “modern football” competitions,’ books?id=kY4tDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+death+%26+life+of​ +australian+soccer&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiY2bD0qY_ he says. nAhW3zzgGHclSC4oQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=%22just%20another%20 In suburban soccer, the ultra scene requires a lot more dedication to the page%22&f=false. cause, an attribute which has often ebbed and flowed. Apart from Sydney Jones, Tobias. ‘Beyond the Violance, the Shocking Power the United’s SUS (Sydney United Supporters), Melbourne Knights’ MCF Ultras Wield Over Italian Football’, The Guardian, 29 Apr. 2018. (Melbourne Croatia Fans) and Marconia’s new group ‘La Stalla’, there’s a https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/29/ beyond-the-violence-shocking-power-ultras-wield-over-italian-football. struggle to maintain a presence in the suburban soccer landscape.

48 | Westerly online 49 | Ahmed Yussuf ‘Kevin Sheedy Press Conference’. YouTube, uploaded by Omikron, 12 May 2013. Irreversible Holden Sheppard is an award- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UQnky71odk. winning author born and bred in Magee, Will. ‘Why is Casual Culture Still Relevant In Football and Fashion?’, Holden Sheppard Geraldton, Western Australia. Vice, 11 July 2017. https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/gybjnq/ His debut Young Adult novel, why-is-casual-culture-still-relevant-in-football-and-fashion. Invisible Boys (Fremantle Press, Mavroudis, Paul. Personal communication. 18 Oct. 2019. 2019) won the 2018 City of Payne, Robin. ‘SOCCER Men Are After Your Boy!’ The Argus 30 June 1952. p. 2. Fremantle Hungerford Award. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article23192019. [Public Domain] Holden’s writing has been Syson, Ian. The Game That Never Happened: The vanishing history of soccer in published in Griffith Review, page Australia. Sports and Editorial Services, 2018. seventeen, Indigo Journal, Ten —. Personal communication. 30 Oct. 2019. Daily and the Huffington Post. He ‘World War 1: The Gallipoli Campaign 4/4’. YouTube, uploaded by mengutimur, 12 Nov. lives in Perth with his husband. 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KwQiokZumc. [Public Domain]

Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders and obtain permission to You’re not important enough for a statue. They only immortalise big, reproduce the images in this essay. Please contact Westerly with any enquiries or extra information relating to these images or their rights holders. important people who did big, important things—politicians, industrial giants, colonial explorers—even though they want to tear them down now. Sometimes, in sophisticated countries, it’s statues of those mega scientists who were clever enough to be famous as well as smart. In Melbourne, now, there is a replica statue of a little girl, but there is nothing small about her: she is a monument to a big ideology, a paradigm shift. You aren’t an ideology or a paradigm. There are no shrines to the tiny moments of tiny people like you, but today you are your own statue: a statue of a cleaner, frozen in a dirty kitchen that used to be ours and is now yours, your finger on the trigger of a spray bottle of something lemon-scented. The gun barrel is jammed; the bullets won’t come out. This will never be done on time. You’re not good at cleaning because you’re not really a cleaner. You’re a labourer. You work in earthmoving and dig trenches for a living and sometimes it’s boring as batshit and sometimes it’s good because you’re outside and you breathe fresh air and get vitamin D and stretch your legs. At the end of the day you can come home and feel like you did something useful with your nine hours. At the end of a project you can take your boyfriend through the Maccas drive thru, black coffee for you and something spiced for him, and drive him past the job. Sometimes the witches hats and signs are still up but it doesn’t make it less of a moment for you. You do what every tradie has done since time immemorial. You drive past and you wind down the window of your SS V ute and you say, ‘See that? I did that.’ Usually he goes, ‘What, made a nice street look like shit?’ And you laugh even though you wish he’d get it. Earthmoving shitkickers like you don’t get the glory of bricklayers. You can’t say, ‘Look at that beautiful house that overlooks the marina. I built that with my bare hands.’ Your

50 | Westerly online 51 | Holden Sheppard work is all underground and nobody sees it but it’s still important and it’s enough to anyone giving it a cursory glance. But then you come home to still beautiful. Your hands laid the orange and white pipes that contain the this dump, this kitchen that was ours and is now just yours, only yours, CCTV camera circuits that caught a rapist outside the nightclub last year. and you add to it, you make it worse, dirtier, and now he’s coming over. And your hands laid the thick black pipe that became a water main for He’ll be here soon and you can’t bring yourself to clean it up in time. He’s the foreshore redevelopment, the only pipe that led water to a whole area going to know what a mess you are. that was once a railyard shitfest and is now an expanse of green lawns You know what stopped you, what made you this absurd statue, a and cute cafés and tourism. You made that happen, you know it, even if thirty-eight-year-old man in his (own) kitchen on a Saturday afternoon, nobody else does. defeated by a half-empty bottle of Ajax. It was the one line on the back of Labourer you are, cleaner you aren’t, save for jumping on the wacker the bottle; the warning label: Corrosive: avoid contact with eyes—will cause packer that rattles your bones as you compact a trench. You pack it tightly irreversible damage. into what it used to look like, but the sand has come out of that trench You’d never seen anything so clear before in your life. The entire and it will never be a part of the ground again. Nope, the earth is a shade planet is papered with cautious, lawyer-filtered words, the ones you darker and the sand in that trench, now it’s been excavated, is a shade click ‘agree’ to without reading. They would always say ‘may’, or ‘could’; lighter. If anyone looks closely enough, they’ll notice, they’ll spot it, this covering arses. But this spray bottle, whatever corrosive chemical they vein of lying earth, lying skin, a fissure in the ground running all the way put in it, they were not fucking around. They knew for sure it would cause from the corner deli to the cop shop. irreversible damage. You don’t really clean. He always used to clean. He was clean; you were But that’s not why you’re frozen. You don’t care about your eyesight dirty. That was clear from the outset. He was more liberated than you, that much, really. Half the time you don’t wear your sunnies on the job so much more. He could say his name in public and wear a pink T-shirt because you hate the pale band of skin you get around the eyes, that if he wanted to. Nobody would bash him—we are past that, he would sunglasses tan. You even looked at that bloody eclipse when he told you say, with confidence—but more importantly he wouldn’t bash himself. not to. He told you to be careful, to take care of your body, but you didn’t More liberated didn’t mean more kinky, though. He was vanilla and you care then and you don’t care now. You would spray that chemical clean were the dirty one. And at first he found it a novelty and then when it got onto your shiny eyeball if someone dared you with enough money. You’d psychological and you wanted it rough and you wanted him to role-play probably even do it for a carton of red cans if you thought you could rinse he’d go along with it and then later, in that afterglow in the bed, he’d stroke it off fast enough. your forehead and wipe you clean and say, ‘Something really must have No, you’re frozen because you are terrified of the irreversible damage fucked you up, ay?’ you’ve already done to yourself. To him. To ours, before ours was yours. Well, this is getting ridiculous, statue boy. You might not be a cleaner And you honestly don’t know. Should you clean, before he comes around? but you’re not an idiot. Just squeeze the damn trigger and wipe the bench Should you tidy up this last three weeks like it didn’t happen? Clean, like down. Goddamn it, there is just shit everywhere in here. You neglected you pack that displaced sand back into the earth, like you sweep the road the hell out of this place. So many weeks now since you’ve lifted a finger. for the public? So many cans of Woodstock and cola, the really strong pre-mix that gets Or do you let him see the mess, the dirt, the decay that you are? you wasted as quickly as possible. So much takeaway. The empty bags No, it’s more than that, and you know it, you coward. You haven’t just stink. You fat fuck. No, not fat. He used to call you stocky and you liked done irreversible damage. You are still scared, still chicken-shit, of the that. ‘I’m a bear cub,’ you would tell him playfully. And he’d snort and irreversible damage that would come. Because right now, digging your twirl fingers through your salt-and-pepper mess of a chest and say, ‘Cub? heels in, you are still safe, here in this shitbox house, in your SS V ute, in I think you left that behind a few years ago, buddy.’ your high-vis, in your steel-capped boots that the young bloke at the job You know how to clean up outside, though. Every day for weeks now— spray-painted when you pissed him off. three weeks, isn’t it?—you sweep up at the end of the day, sweep the debris Safe. back into the trench, leave the road as clean as possible. Pedestrians can He didn’t want you to be safe anymore. He said he needed an answer. pass again during the evening. The work-in-progress looks presentable He said a year and a half was too long for you to still be coming to terms

52 | Westerly online 53 | Holden Sheppard with it. He said he loved you and you said it back, but he said he needed He smirks and looks sad. ‘Sure you are.’ The box rattles as he turns. you to be real. He needed you to not just whisper it in an underground ‘Bye, Peter.’ pipe but say it out loud, walk down the street with him, build a monument And his sad smirk destroys you, because he should be happy, he should to the two of you, to us, to ours. be laughing in bed with you like he was three weeks ago, and it’s because ‘Stop calling yourself straight,’ he eventually screamed, and he was of you that he’s sad, and you’re sad, and your house is covered in shit. crying and you weren’t. And that’s when you know for sure that you don’t need to freeze with ‘But I am,’ you insisted. ‘I am straight. But I still like you.’ your finger on that trigger anymore, because that irreversible damage You are straight because to not be straight would be corrosive bleach you’re scared of is inevitable. It is going to happen whether you act or right on the crotch. Why the hell couldn’t he get his head around that? He whether you don’t. was younger and he was a city kid and his parents were lefties so it was so If you clean yourself up, you’ll lose everything, you know. You’ll be the easy for him and he had no compassion for you, just frustration, eighteen butt of jokes and you’re not sure you can take that on the chin for more months and then one big argument where he just let rip and you let him than a day. You’ll be left out of the loop, the frat house will close its doors tear you apart. To be fair, you pushed him. Yes, when he got up in your to you, and when you sit in the pub for a pint the barman won’t make the face, you pushed him, and feeling his rib cage against your hard fingers same jokes he used to make with you, and you’ll just be a statue of a man, felt satisfying, so you pushed him again, harder, so he would hurt and so the right look and feel, but none of the blood circulating in his veins. he would understand how dangerous he was, how much you loved him but Or you could stay here, in this hovel, never pull the trigger, never how much he threatened to destroy you. take the action you’re terrified of, but you won’t be immune to the You were on guard, but the knock at the door catches you by surprise consequences. He’ll leave. This is him, right now, turning his back on you anyway. It’s not his happy, jaunty knock—he wants to make it clear he’s forever, because you let him down. You couldn’t come to the table and not happy or jaunty anymore—but it’s definitely him, because it’s three now he’s done with you. o’clock and he said he’d be here at three, and he is always a man of his And him being done with you, actually, is worse than the rest of the word, unlike you. world being done with you. You open the door with the bottle of cleaning liquid still in hand, shit ‘Brenton, wait!’ still all over the entire house, you filthy animal. You can’t quite believe you said it. ‘G’day sexy,’ you say to him like you used to, like it’s nothing. He turns. ‘I don’t want to talk about it anymore.’ ‘Hi Peter. Don’t call me that. I just came for my stuff.’ ‘But I do.’ You fold your arms. You’ve never been good at this stuff. ‘Listen. You force yourself to rest the Ajax on the bench. Grab the cardboard If I could change…if I could do what you want, would that change anything?’ box. (You taped it up because seeing his trinkets poking out was He doesn’t believe you, you can tell, because there are no tears in his excruciating.) eyes, and he doesn’t look like he’s holding a game of tug of war inside that ‘All yours,’ you say, handing him the box. It’s lighter than eighteen busy mind. months should be. It practically feels like nothing at all. ‘If you actually changed—if you didn’t just talk about it—then, maybe.’ A His nose is screwed up. His gaze travels quickly along the bench, its flick of the eyes over your face. ‘But I’ll believe it when I see it.’ debris and detritus, then he jerks away, like he’s seen more of you than The eye-flick meant everything. he wanted to. ‘Next Saturday,’ you say, ‘I want us to get a pint. At the Foundation Hotel. ‘This place is a bloody pigsty.’ He never could stop his thoughts leak­ Together.’ ing out. His forehead furrows. He didn’t expect this. ‘So…what, when someone Once upon a time, three weeks ago, you would have wound your arms recognises you and comes over to our table, you’ll slap me on the back around him, squeezed his bubble butt and said, ‘I guess that makes me a and call me “mate”, yeah?’ pig, right? Oink.’ ‘No.’ Your skin is on fire, corrosive chemicals eating through its Today, you say, ‘I know. Been too busy at work.’ Then you nod to that protective layers into the flesh, and there is no undoing it. ‘I’ll call you yellow bottle of cleaning fluid. ‘I’m cleaning up today.’ Brenton and you can call me Peter.’

54 | Westerly online 55 | Holden Sheppard His eyes finally spring, like a trench weeping as it reaches the water The Flat Ashleigh Angus is currently table. He looks away at once, opens the fly-wire door with his back turned Ashleigh Angus completing a collaborative PhD to you. in creative writing at Curtin University and Aberdeen ‘Okay. I think I’m free next Saturday. Text me if you mean it. Later.’ University. Her writing has been Once he leaves, you survey all the shit on the kitchen bench, then take published in Axon, Pause (PWP out a gigantic black plastic bag and pour that cascade of rubbish into it, so Curtin, 2019) and Causeway/ much rubbish you could have drowned in it, and you tie it up and chuck it Cabhsair, and she was the in the bottle-green wheelie bin under the carport. You feel like a surgeon winner of the Lewis Grassic who just extracted a cancerous tumour from an otherwise healthy man. Gibbon prize for creative You pick up that bottle, and all you had to do the whole time, really, was writing in 2018. make sure the barrel wasn’t aimed at your own eyes. And it isn’t, now. It’s aimed at the dirt, and you pull the trigger at last and squirt, and everything dark and dirty can sparkle again, corrosive chemicals spray all around I had not noticed that the window above the bed looked out onto a you, so dangerous, but they don’t hurt, they don’t kill you at all because graveyard when I signed the rental agreement. The headstones poked you don’t let them get in your eyes. out of the hill, swaying drunkenly. I did not like the look of them. If I had And, finally, a little smile twitches on your once-dead statue of a face. seen them from the street, I would have crossed to the other side. There This kitchen is clean for the first time. It doesn’t look like it did when it was they were, singing, yelling, and clinking glass bottles. But in my bedroom, ours, and it doesn’t look like it did when it was yours. I could not walk away; I had to keep staring at them as they told me their ‘This is mine,’ you say, gun still in hand. ‘All mine.’ names and asked me to smile. And the mine gets stronger the more you say it, the more you look at The window was framed by white curtains, which, tied up, looked neat, it, and you realise you aren’t even you anymore, you are I. And I am not a but once unravelled looked almost damp with yellow stains. I could not statue, they will never make a statue out of a man like me, not for a tiny decide which I disliked more: the gravestones or the curtains. moment like this in a tiny life. But it happened in this kitchen: I became I tied up the curtains. At least the gravestones shined like a clean not ours or yours anymore. I became mine. granite countertop. I removed everything from the bedroom that made me feel slightly nauseous: two green candles, a red glass bowl, a resin sphere, and a framed black and white photo of a cheerful mother and child, and I put them in the storage cupboard behind a pile of towels. The quilt cover also made my stomach turn. I was sure it had been blue when I viewed the place, but it was as yellow as the curtains and had brown and white stripes rippling across it. The walls too, which I thought had been eggshell, were the colour of melted butter, as was the lampshade. I put that in the cupboard as well and left to buy new bedsheets before dark.

When I walked back into the building, with a glossy package under my arm, I saw a man standing on the lower floor beside the stairs, smoking. The door to the back garden was open, but the smoke did not filter out of it; it floated up the stairs, turning the red walls black. I hated the smell. The man’s thick lips pressed up into a smile, his cheeks rising in folds. ‘Hello,’ he said, with some kind of accent. I smiled back at him.

56 | Westerly online 57 | Ashleigh Angus He wore grey tracksuit pants and a matching grey sweatshirt with the bouncing up and down as he nodded. The wire must have been long. Was hood pulled over his head, the string tight at his neck. I couldn’t decide if he on the phone? I thought. Or was he talking to himself? he looked like a child pretending to be a middle-aged man, or a middle- aged man pretending to be a child. The walls of my bedroom seemed to amplify the man’s muttering, and ‘Hello,’ he said again. I woke several times in the night to his voice burying itself in my ear, ‘Hello,’ I replied. Why had he said it again? I had smiled, hadn’t I? as though he were leaning over my bed. At 6am, I finally gave myself He nodded at me, and I stepped cautiously onto the stairs. His eyes permission to get up. followed me all the way up. It seemed as though whenever I walked in or out of the building, the The hall light above the flat next to mine’s front door was on. It had not grey man was there: smoking, sometimes drinking as well. He wore the been when I left. Someone must live there. I hoped it was not the grey same tracksuit every day. ‘Hello,’ he said whenever he saw me, his cheeks man. I liked to think it was a woman, about my mother’s age. I imagined pushing out of his hood, but he was not satisfied with an answering nod. her knocking on my door and introducing herself; please, come by if you ‘Hello,’ he repeated, over and over, smoke leaking from his mouth, until I need anything, she would say; absolutely anything. And watch out for the answered him. man who likes to smoke by the back door. You tell me if he tries anything ‘Hello,’ I replied. with you, absolutely anything. His eyes slid all over me.

I opened my package in the bedroom, pulled the neatly folded sheets out I tried the café around the corner from my building. I sat on a stool by of the plastic cover. I felt as though I was undressing my grandmother the window, hunched slightly, hoping I looked to everyone like someone as I peeled the striped material off the bed, afraid of what I would find who was comfortable being alone, who did not mind sitting on the stools underneath. There was a fat stain on the right side of the mattress. The in the café so as not to deprive a couple of a table for two; someone who spot where it was felt cool, as though still wet, even through the new sheets. turned the pages of their book in time with the bell above the door, never I slept on the left, so as not to touch it, but I was off balance: I always slept noticing the people who walked in and out. I should go to a café and read on the right. more often, they would think when they saw me. What a great thing to do; As I lay there, I thought about the grey man. He must have heard me I really should do it more often. on the stairs, had probably counted how many floors I had walked up. He I turned the pages whenever I remembered. I didn’t want people to knew now that I lived in the building and which door was mine. He was, think I was only pretending to read. But, really, I was thinking about how perhaps, the only one who knew I was there. every morning I might just come here and have a coffee in this café, and that I would make friends with the barista, and how she would get to know At 3am I heard someone enter the apartment next to mine. My bedroom my order, and have it ready for me just as I stepped through the door. door was open, and I saw the hallway light, which had been filtering I took a sip and noticed a heap of grey just outside the window. I put my through the glass in my front door, turn off. The footsteps were so close, I mug down, spilling it a little. What was he doing? He must have just left began to think that they had not gone into the flat next-door, but into my our building, for I had seen him on my way out. Was he looking for me? flat, and were now pacing in my living room. Please, please, please, I thought; don’t look up; don’t pause at the door; I crept out of the bedroom, and the footsteps shifted to my right. They don’t come inside. seemed to be walking up and down the length of our shared wall. A deep He walked past the window, but, just before disappearing behind the voice joined the footsteps; he was talking furiously, pausing often, as wall, glanced over his shoulder, grinned at me, and mouthed the word though waiting for an encouraging word. I thought, at first, that he was ‘Hello.’ waiting for me to say something, but then figured that he must be on the I started back. phone. I pictured him holding a beige telephone, the twisted black wire Had the stool shrieked, or had I?

58 | Westerly online 59 | Ashleigh Angus Someone touched my arm, and I flinched. The pharmacist said all she had were antihistamine sleeping pills. She ‘Are you alright?’ said I mustn’t take them for a long period of time, and that they could Why did she have to ask me that? Why couldn’t she just let me walk out make me drowsy. I pretended to think seriously about it for a moment and quietly? I thought we might have been friends. I said I was fine, a little too replied: ‘I will take them.’ loudly, and picked up my things. I walked, forcibly calm, out of the café and to my building, and ran up the stairs. When I got back to the flat, I flung open the window above my bed, but it brought in no fresh air. I stuck my head out, noting that there was no fly Some kind of strange smell had begun to fill my apartment, a different wire or latch; that the window swung out wide and was large enough to smell to the cigarette smoke. I thought it might be coming from my fridge, climb through. I turned my head, saw a curl of smoke and a flash of skin, for it smelt like sweetly rotting food, but there was no food in my fridge ducked back inside, and shut the window tight. Green was leaning out of to rot, and I noted, anxiously, that I would have to go to the grocery store. his apartment, smoking. But his cigarette smelled different to Groper’s. Then I thought it might be my laundry powder, for my clothes reeked of It’s weed, I thought, with sudden clarity. I wanted to rinse my lungs out. it, and the smell poured out of the gap above the laundry machine. It was as though a lady, a heavy smoker dressed in damp, grass-stained tights, The hallway light dripping in a sweet scent to mask her smell, had come into my apartment, slept on my couch, tried on all my clothes, and was now hiding behind the Mon – off all day. and night. washing machine, breathing through the gap. Tue – off. Wed – off. Once, I heard the grey man walk up the stairs; he stopped and opened Thu – on 3pm. off 3am. a door on the third floor. The next morning I checked the mail in the Fri – on 5pm. off 4am. pigeonhole at the front to see which apartment was his. I didn’t think he Sat – on 4:30pm. off 3am. was Mrs O. Clarke in flat E, so he must be Mr R. Groper, in F. I checked the Sun – on 4pm. off 2:30am. pigeonhole for the flat next to mine: H. The letters were addressed to Mr Green. I wondered if Groper had also looked here to find my name. Chilled, Green stayed in all day from Monday to Wednesday and was out for most I grabbed the pile of letters addressed to me and put them in my bag. of the night from Thursday to Sunday. If ever I didn’t hear him leave, I only had to look to see if his hallway light was on; if it was, he was definitely ‘I need something to help me sleep,’ I told the pharmacist. ‘I have hardly out. He smoked at least once a day during the week and three times on slept in weeks.’ the weekend: when he woke, again at noon, and once more before he left. He asked me what the trouble was. ‘Jetlag,’ I lied. The sound of his feet coming up the stairs at night, and the screech of his He didn’t want to give me anything. Instead, he told me about sleep key in the door, made me want to scream. Once inside, he muttered and hygiene. He suggested spraying lavender scent on my pillow. I thought paced. The steady creaking made it sound like he was pressing down on a about lavender mixing with the smell already in my room and almost rusted peddle with his foot, a peddle attached to the end of my bed, each gagged. He told me to stick to a routine; get up and go to bed at the same downward thrust tilting me further and further towards the window. I was time every day. Exercise. Only use your bedroom for sleep, nothing else: frightened that I had not secured the latch properly, and that my head, no movies, work, nothing. The man in line behind me said ‘A stiff brandy sliding further and further down the bed, would force open the glass, and before bed’ll do it.’ there would be nothing to stop me from slipping into the graveyard.

At the next pharmacy, I tried to appear less desperate, asking, hesitantly, One day, a man came over to set up the Wi-Fi. The man called me when if there were anything at all to help jetlag; ‘I can’t seem to stay awake he was outside the building because the buzzer was hanging off the wall, at work.’

60 | Westerly online 61 | Ashleigh Angus tangled in its own innards. I was surprised at how young he was, and I was talk low together, and they would giggle, and then they would not talk at glad of it. all, and when that happened I wondered what he did with them. I said ‘hello’ to him just like my mother had done when letting tradesmen into the house. Then I led him up the stairs, my arm outstretched beside My bedside table yawned at me, filled as it was with rows and rows of me on the banister to make it impossible for him to walk next to me. small white teeth. I picked them out, one a night, put them into my mouth, He stood a good distance away when we were in the flat, and I was and swallowed. But they did not make me sleep; they only made me dumb. comforted; so comforted that I even asked him how his day had been I often found myself with one hand on the front door, a bag in the other, so far. wondering why I needed to go outside; thinking, whatever the reason, it ‘Good,’ he replied, looking around him. ‘Where is your line?’ he asked. was not important enough because I had forgotten it, and if it was not I faltered. Line? Should I know what a line is? important, it would be best not to go outside at all. He walked up the hall, his head down. ‘Ah,’ he said, crouching in front of a strange looking power point, ‘here it is.’ Online grocery shopping is a wonderful thing. I sighed. I dreamt I was in a hospital waiting room. Two girls, identical twins, sat While he worked in the hallway, I sat at the table in the living room on my on either side of me. They moved like mirror images: as though I was the laptop. Every now and then the man stuck his head around the corner mirror between them, and they were reflections of themselves. Their to ask me something. He looked startled at first, seeing me sitting there, hair was combed smooth. They wore sunny yellow dresses, and over one and apologised for disturbing me; he must have thought that I was doing hand, the ones closest to me, a blue sock. With those sock hands they something important. I thought, perhaps, that I should stop typing out the poked my ribs and the fleshy part underneath at exactly the same time, in alphabet and write whatever it was that he thought I was writing, and then exactly the same place. A man, who I thought must be their father, sat in maybe I would have something good, something I might like to print out. the row behind us. I could not turn my head to look at him, but I knew he I could have sat and worked on the couch but sitting on a soft surface was there. He smiled at his daughters, admiring their puppet work. When, might give the man the wrong idea. Sitting in the bedroom of course, finally, I managed to turn my head enough to glance at him, his face fell. would have just been begging for it. Make sure you change out of your He wrapped his arms around my chest and squeezed, and the two sock pyjamas before the men arrive, my mother used to say. And put on a bra; hands dived between my ribs. you do not want to give them any ideas. But now, after seeing the man, I wished I had not drowned myself in a ‘Hello!’ I said before Groper could. That really got him. sweater, and I wished I had put on some makeup and washed my hair. I wondered if I should ask him if he wanted a coffee or if I should tell him Is Groper friends with Green? a joke about the graves outside my bedroom window. I wondered what his laugh would sound like. I wondered what my laugh would sound like. I ran my hands over the dividing wall, sure there was a hole in it, I put my laptop to sleep and, using the black screen as a mirror, somewhere, that Green had drilled. It would be easy to hide a hole in neatened my hair. porridge walls filled with lumps and shadows. I didn’t like to undress in He did not want a coffee. He said he was done and needed to be across my bedroom without a robe draped over my shoulders, sure that, on those town for his next appointment. He started packing up his things, and I had nights Green did not have women with him, he was watching me. the sudden urge to grab his arm and beg him to stay. I hoped my neighbour had heard him through the wall. I hoped he saw The flat below mine was having a party. They were all there, everyone him leave. I hoped he thought he was my boyfriend. in the building, except for me; laughing, smoking, slipping money into Green’s clammy hands. The smell of weed was bleeding up through Sometimes other voices joined Green’s. Women. Always a different voice, the carpet. but all very young sounding, much younger than he sounded. They would

62 | Westerly online 63 | Ashleigh Angus When it was over, Green would return to his apartment and slide the I have hidden the knives in the cupboard below the sink, behind a pile of stack of money beneath his mattress. But, before pulling his hand out pots, so that if I ever reach for them, I will knock the pots, and wake myself completely, his fingers would deflate, transforming into five slippery from whatever fever I am in. condoms, all different colours, filled, and tied at the knuckles. And there they would stay, hanging limply from the bed beneath the notes, while My wrist is very itchy. I put a sock over my right hand to keep myself from his hand emerged fingerless. And for a moment he would admire the neat scratching it. I do not want to disturb the scab. stretch of skin where his fingers used to be and watch with pleasure as five new ones pushed themselves through, pink and sensitive. I begin to sleep with socks over both hands: long ones that fold twice over my veins so that the knives might have some obstacle if the pots do not wake me. I lay in bed, eyes drifting. The voices seemed further away, the music muffled and low, and I felt such a rush of anticipation at the idea I might I push a suitcase filled with books against my bedroom door at night. sleep that I knocked myself out of it completely. I turned onto my side, and, once again, the music from below came to me clearly. I had moved It is difficult to chop tomatoes with a butter knife. onto the stain. I screamed into my pillow.

Someone was banging on my door, yelling and yelling, not words, just a throaty cry, sometimes long, sometimes falling in time with their banging. This was it, I thought; this was the night they had been waiting for. They had discussed it at the party. I wondered how long the door would last, the latch would last, I would last, they would last. I pressed myself into the window, the glass cooling my back, wishing now that the latch would break, and that I would tumble into the graveyard, and then perhaps that the dead would teach me how to sleep. The banging went on and on. And I began to realise that the person was really banging on Green’s door, not mine. Then the yelling stopped, abruptly, and, after some time, so did the banging. I heard the person retreat down the stairs, and I edged away from the window and cried.

I washed the dishes, staring at the sharp things that floated in the water, wondering what would happen if I was careless: if one were to slip from my sponge. The soap suds were no longer white. I reached for the plug so I could fill the sink with clean water, but paused, thinking how peculiar the colour was: the soap was not brown like usual, but pinkish. I lifted my hands out of the sink, ran into the bathroom and leaned over the basin, gagging. I put my wrist under water but that only made it look worse, so I wrapped a hand towel around it, desperately, as if trying to stop my hand from falling off. Had I meant to do it? I thought, horrified. My skin suddenly felt very thin.

64 | Westerly online 65 | Ashleigh Angus We’re Going to Get Nailed David Stavanger is a poet, performer, cultural producer, David Stavanger editor and lapsed psychologist. His first full-length poetry collection The Special (UQP, 2014) won several prizes and his latest collection is Case Notes (UWAP, 2020). David is also the co-editor of SOLID AIR: Collected Australian & New Zealand Spoken Word (UQP, 2019.)

Have you ever seen a footpath on fire? The plume is getting all the way No, because there’s nothing to burn. [they say] to South America.

I know we’re in the worst drought in white man history. Sharing the good news on coal [our gift to a developing world]

You think every tree is sacred? [We can’t] make The Australian fire-proof Not the ones near the roads. [have we reached] the warning of the light.

Don’t get me wrong—we’re not environmental bastards. If it burns, tax it. If it keeps burning, regulate it. And if it stops Our priorities are life, property [and then environment ranks third]. burning, subsidise it. I am sick of the government being in my life.

For God’s sake, maybe we just listen to those blokes The millionaires and billionaires who chose to invest in Australia [and girls] out there on the front line. are actually those who most help the poor stay young.

You remove heavy metals out of the ground Are we doing enough about so-called climate change? In my view, too much. turn that into tabled dreams. CC is a bogey man. So, should I start with my Thatcher quotes?

We’ve done everything we can to settle with that group. The upshot is that the cause of the fires is certainly man-made. Offering men sex for cigarettes. Mining welfare. Our great policy phantom—Christ. We’re going to get nailed.

Don’t forget, as settled Australians [as Europeans] This secret needs to be spread widely. we’re now living and working [and occupying] areas.

A coffee urn in the hall. Woolworths vouchers and gunja. Health care, low morale, christening everyone Solomon.

Note: this poem features direct and remixed quotes from Barnaby Joyce, Andrew Forrest, Gina Rinehart, and ABC News TV anchors.

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