Best Before 2010

#This is a silly little piece I scribbled down for the ABC Open's 500 Words Workshop at the festival this month. It has since been published on the ABC Open website here and featured on ABC Radio National.

My grandma is trying to kill me. I know this now. I am comfortable with the idea, the way you might relax around the spider on the wall one evening with just the right amount of wine rubbing between your synapses and tell it all your darkest secrets.

Of course, Grandma’s weapon of choice is perhaps more subtle than your average 90 year old murderer’s. My grandma is trying to kill me with food. Specifically, with food at least four months past its use-by-date. It began innocently enough, ice-cream cones that cracked and cut the sides of my mouth, beef I had to chew for an hour long special of The Golden Girls. She’d give that same coy denial, reach out one veiny hand for the faded package and double check the date. Dad’s teeth would grind together. I remember sucking on jelly babies as hard as toffee, climbing into her pantry and finding bread mottled blue and grey like zombie skin.

It was never gravely concerning back then. After all, Grandma had been a chef before her hip operation. She was forever shrieking about dishing out stew to American soldiers in the smoke and ash streets of Germany. Their strange voices, laughing together over tables groaning with food; fresh crates of beans and potatoes coming in from whatever scraps of farmland had survived the war and nothing to season them with; that first stiff winter pregnant with Dad and stealing from her own stores. Then, Australia.

So, if the odd packet of biscuits skipped past their date with the bin, we called her thrifty. We praised that hoarding instinct leftover from a time when two suitcases worth of Reinsmark couldn’t buy an apple. But, as Grandma has aged, so has her pantry. Yes, think liver spots and liver snaps. Those pantry walls are slick with danger these days.

We had all the interventions, of course. After Dad vomited up a plate of tuna halfway through dinner, drastic measures were taken, shelves emptied and restocked. Mum poked all the milk lumps down through the sink grate and that jam jar crusted over with something green, pungent and possibly sentient was safely dropped in the neighbour’s trash. After that, we placed Grandma on a shopping “probation”, that meant she trailed along behind the trolley in the supermarket, muttering snatches of German under her breath that I sometimes remembered from class. (I’d only learnt the bad words.) We stopped eating meals at her house, though she’d always lay out the place settings anyway. Mum said she was trying to guilt us into lifting the probation.

Then, Dad died.

That afternoon, I ate stale mint slices with her; I ate scones gone dry in the middle with jam and cream, I ate that potato salad leftover from Christmas. I ate whatever she put in front of me. I thought vomiting might help. But, she’d been taking Mum’s advice: it was all under three months old.

Now, I eat with her most Wednesday afternoons, shrewdly testing each bite. We don’t talk much; we were never very good at talking to each other. Still, when I hand over my empty plate, she looks at me and, sometimes, even if she’s yelling, I can see the ghost of my dad shivering there in the corners of her eyes, tugging at her mouth, a certain expression or an eyebrow raised. It only lasts a second. It's usually punctuated by one German expletive or another. But, for a moment, I remember how two people so maddeningly different could be mother and son. And, I wonder if she’s ever seen the same look in my eyes, the same flash of brown.

Those are the days I ask for seconds.

For Liam

I wrote this post just a few days after learning of the MH17 disaster last month and the tragic death of Liam Davison. I didn’t post it then. I’m not sure why, but I thought it belonged here now.

With Liam Davison at the Eastern Regional Libraries Writing Awards

The whole world has had the breath knocked out of its lungs, stopping dead in the street to gape at an iPhone screen, leaving the TV on in the next room during the washing up, and I have been in Ballarat.

Bloody Ballarat.

I both love and hate travelling for work. Last week, while the people were kind, the internet was not. Facebook half loaded a status about “some bastard who shot down a commercial–“ and then promptly dissolved into white space. Given I was being slow cooked under the bright lights of Wendouree shopping centre at the time, with advertisements flashing by on screens, on walls and from between the lips of one throaty sales woman with a microphone, I was probably less concerned than I should have been.

It was my mother’s voice on the phone Friday afternoon that finally tipped me off. It was thick and wobbly.

On the drive back to Melbourne in that cramped rental car, I checked the ABC website. I went on The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. I googled the new phrase MH17 furiously, before I really understood what it meant. I told my colleagues everything I could. We sat in the dark on the Monash highway for thirty minutes, watching videos, reading articles, taking it in.

It is a strange thing coming late to tragedy; seeing the political responses already circulating, the information having been mostly glued together by now, the commentators encamped on their respective sides. But, it wasn’t until I was back home and hunched over the heater Saturday night that I saw a familiar face flash by on the six pm news. Australian author, Liam Davison, had been travelling back from the Netherlands with his wife, Frankie, when their plane was shot down over Ukraine. 

He was among the 298 MH17 dead.

I met Liam as an eleven year old. He was, of course, somewhat older, already an award winner, and so tall I had to crane my head until my neck clicked. We were at the awards ceremony for the Eastern Regional Libraries state writing competition, standing under bright lights holding bad sandwiches. As the judge that year, Liam was obliged not to comment on the ratio of cheese to cucumber and had awarded me the junior prize. There was sherry and bookshelves to hide behind; John Wood came down from rehearsing a play to present the awards. At school the next morning, I told everyone it had been Brad Pitt handing me that prize cheque. One girl asked to examine it for fingerprints.

So, while my dad giggled away into his sherry glass and my sister cooed over John Wood, Liam pulled me aside for over an hour to discuss my writing. I don’t remember all of what he said to me that night. I was eleven after all and we were close to a shiny new display of Jackie French books. What I do remember has survived as a kind of mantra, something I half reach for when I’m in doubt or I don’t know what comes next. Liam frowned a lot when he spoke, even when laughing. He was the first person to tell me I could do the thing I love every day, and keep on doing it, until I got a wrist cramp or my electricity was cut off. He was generous like that.

Now, gearing up for the Bendigo Writers Festival next week, I can’t stop thinking of that night and wondering if something began there, a lit fuse in my head. I can’t stop thinking of Liam. 

I know I am only just setting out on the journey he dedicated his life to – this business of writing. I know I have a lot more yet to scribble down and chop up and type and print and bin, mostly in that order. But, when I saw his face on that 6 pm news bulletin, I made a promise to him never to stop. From here on out, I will write knowing that time is short and stories are quick; they will flash like lightning across the page if you let them loose, and I want to spend my life, as Liam did, chasing them down.

So, to the man who lit that fuse, I say thank you. I will try to honour you as best I can, with every story I catch from this day on.

R.I.P Liam and Frankie
My thoughts are with your families.

Remembering Bendigo

The last time I was here, he held the doors open for me. I remember because they smelt of rain and wood rot, of the hill we’d climbed to get there, of muddy shoes and misty half formed things I couldn’t name then, of others I still can’t now.

Today, the doors are locked.

I didn’t mean to come back here. It was the Writers Festival that brought me to Bendigo, after all, not the church on the hill. Joel walks around the back, photographing the stonework, bending to read the memorial. I rock forward on my heels. But, I am here, where we were that summer Mum threw her back out, and I can’t leave just yet. There is a light on in one of the second storey windows and only one little grey hatchback in the driveway.

Seeing this place from the car window last night, those tall spires reaching up over the sunset, I didn’t recognise it. Something in my gut did perhaps, some squirming cell dividing in fright. But, it wasn’t until I heard a familiar name in a seminar this afternoon that the memory broke open for me. The road trip to Bendigo, with matching rainbow sunglasses and those ratty Batman socks; Dad singing to Pink Floyd louder than anyone really should.

There is a reason this place feels so familiar, like perfume left on a jumper. I remember counting every set of old, stone steps, running between the hedges and laughing at my sister’s footsteps. Now, the angels of the courtyard sit and stare at the stars through glass. They look no older.

I remember other things as well; long white candles and silence pressing the walls together, a man carved with lines in his face, that cathedral ceiling soaring above it all like a second sky. Until we came here, I don’t remember ever being inside a church before.

The light on upstairs flickers and goes out but I am caught under the stare of the gargoyles of the tower and I don’t move. That name I heard this afternoon belongs to a guest panellist at the festival. She is now an established editor but, around the time I was last standing here staring up at these stone monsters, I knew her as my school librarian. She was the one to first place Harry Potter in my hands – not long before that infamous trip to Bendigo in fact. I remember because the book was on the seat beside me the entire way and the sun through the glass slow cooked its front cover.

There is the smell of my childhood on this festival. Today, I saw my sister’s piano teacher humming over her coffee in a cafe. An old friend sat two rows behind me in our morning seminar before I realised who he was. And, a few weeks before I came here, a man I knew as an eleven year old, was killed in the MH17 plane crash disaster. His name was Liam Davison and he was an acclaimed Australian author. His shadow has lain over this festival for me ever since.

I think I needed to come to Bendigo. I think the festival was just a happy excuse. It has been four years now since I saw Dad or heard him laughing from the living room. He laughed the way lions roar. But, for the last four years, I haven’t quite been able to remember it, the pitch or tone, that precise throaty timbre. Standing here today and I almost can. It’s not the Bendigo wind. It’s not the fact that I haven’t felt cold here once since I arrived yesterday evening.

It’s this cathedral. I am back walking the paths I explored as a child, staring up at the church by which I still compare all others, that made me dream of Europe and monasteries on mountains and stonemasons with cramps in their hands.

I am back at Sacred Heart Cathedral. And I remember because Dad was here.

Sherryn's Festival Blogging Rule No. 27: Anything written after 1 am is exempt from editing.