Sample short stories from ‘Other Lives’

Lives Of Our Mothers

Your mother for instance…

born into the heart of a London snow storm. Everything white. Hospital walls and floors. Straight jacketed beds. Uniforms of interns. Issue paper under poised pens. Falling snow. Bared teeth. And at one point, your grandmother’s eyes. Not the blood. Not the lie about pain. But everything else. Everything else that day was white. Your mother’s lagging head followed her feet into the white light and never knew what hit it. She knows that by now she should have eyes in the back of her head like her mother and grandmother before her but sometimes it is all she can do to put one foot, one word in front of the other. Sometimes she wonders if she wasn’t born snow blind.

It could never snow where you were born. Under a spotlight of Australian sun. In a part of the country where the streets were lined with jacaranda trees whose purple blooms could save the day from extinction and three calls from a curlew could still the blood in a superstitious heart. Where your mother battled morning sickness with cups of tea and Vegemite toast (no butter) and a neighbour offered jars of home made lemon and passion fruit spread which accumulated like failed science experiments in the only kitchen cupboard. Where geckos climbed the walls like Lilliputian dragons. Where your mother saw her first ghost. Where she practiced deep breathing you into existence, dreaming up the good life. Where she loved your father and he loved her back.

In hospital your mother dreamed blind doctors fingered her, fished for you. By night fall you had joined forces and were fighting back. By morning tea your world was sliced open and your mother lost to a drug induced sleep. For the next forty eight hours the blood vessels in your mother’s brain tried to burst and half orphan you. When she came to, somebody told her she was lucky. Lucky she wasn’t older or fatter or – in that hospital, in that town – Aboriginal. Lucky all she would have to show for it was a bikini line scar neat as origami. Lucky. When she tried to sit up she felt like the lady the magician sawed in half. When she was wheeled into the nursery she scanned rows of premature baby heads and thought How will I know if they give me the right one? How will she know? What will we come to make of each other?

Your great grandmother knew how to make ends meet. She wound strands of her daughter’s hair along strips of old bed sheets to produce Shirley Temple ringlets. Later showing them how to pinch their cheeks for effect just before a date. She taught them how to milk a cow. How to cut the head off a chicken. How to raise their voices above their future husbands. How to stretch silence like a sling shot. How to use a wooden spoon. How to belly laugh. How not to lie.

Your grandmother admits to lying to your grandfather only once. Your mother was still a baby and they were about to go out as a family and he said Have you bathed the baby? and she said Yes. The lie was for your grandmother’s nerves because your mother could scream blue murder under water. When her displaced hips were diagnosed your mother had both legs in plaster for eight months and stopped screaming. Everyone said then What a good baby. What a good little girl.

Your grandmother thought she would only ever want boys and had five girls. When she was a teenager, your grandmother wanted to change her name from Rosemary to Bob. By the time she met your grandfather, she had travelled the world and was working as a barmaid in a London pub with a teaching diploma to settle down on if it came to that. But she knew she would never be content re arranging the furniture. She was five foot two, eyes of blue. He was taller, eyes a Tolkien green – deep enough to float or drown in. When he asked for her name she gave it to him. When they crossed the street together he placed his hand on her elbow. His hand on her elbow. That’s all it took. For her to want him.

When your mother was a little girl she wanted to be an astronaut, a circus clown, Mother
Theresa and the Invisible Man. She believed she was a visiting angel who knew everything but had promised not to tell. On the way to school she picked yellow daisies which made her late for school but beautiful. On the way home she climbed trees swaying happily until she remembered her fear of heights. At night she read books about travel through time and space.

Your grandmother read Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock and day dreamed about committing the perfect crime of passion. Once she held a carving knife in the provocative space between herself and your grandfather. It was rage pure and simple. If asked she will laugh and call it by another name because our mothers are never who we think they are. They are always more. They are always less.

Your mother for instance…