Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

All the windows are down so that the January heat fuels the already escalating tension in the car. Her little sister Kath and cousin Rita talk excitedly in the back seat about the days ahead and don’t notice her mounting anger towards Steve. He squints his eyes, dragging on the cigarette in his mouth while his handiwork on the gear stick shifts the car between lanes in an edgy, rapid-fire dance that makes her catch her breath.

Slow down Steve. This isn’t fun or smart, you’re showing off. Stop it.

Hey, relax. I know what I’m doing.

Well, do it on your own. My sister’s in the car.

Steve is 19 years old and he’s supposed the be the adult amongst them, but she, five years younger feels furious with him, repelled by his brazen risk-taking. They are supposed to be family; his mother and her father are first cousins. He’s supposed to be the adult today.

He is showing off and she is not impressed. Just like she is underwhelmed when he leans on his car, smoking indifferently and he offers a wry smile to what she believes to be a great joke, recounted by her with accuracy and skill.

She finds it hard to look away from his grease-stained nails and hardened hands. She’s seen him numerous times in the mouth of the car, outside his parents’ house, head down, hands at work, back defiantly ignoring the world.

She feels his blue hooded eyes staring at her curiously sometimes. The blackened stain, like an ink teardrop above his left cheek bone is the result of a welding accident he suffered when he didn’t wear a safety helmet. It reminds her that he does not care; that he is foolhardy and dangerous. She is drawn to him and repulsed by him in equal measure.

The city shines in the morning sun behind them. Her thighs are sweating against the vinyl seat. The smell of tar and rubber fill the car while it is slow on the road, stuck between other commuters as keen to get to the beach as them. She is relieved to have a break from his sped-up, frenzied driving.

She picks up the cassette case under the tape deck and asks what The Nylon Curtain means. He shrugs his shoulders, blowing smoke out of the car window where it dissipates in the hot air. He turns the volume button so that she can’t talk to him anymore without shouting. Rita and Kath pick up on the lyrics so that by the end of the song they are singing loudly, off-key and swaying wildly in the back seat.

And we’re living here in Allentown

Steve turns the volume down and he dryly tells the girls not to give up their day jobs. She turns away so that he doesn’t see her smiling. Her sticky thighs lift off the car seat and resettle without comfort. The sun’s now on her brown, lithe thighs, highlighting the soft hairs like a field of wheat. There’s no respite from the heat, even with the windows down.

Your legs are hairy.

So? I shave the important bits. What’s it to you?

Shaving became permissible as soon as she turned 12, but only from the knee down. Her mother insisted on this arbitrary rule. She hates him even more and can’t wait to get out of the car. He is back on open road again, speeding and over-taking, speeding and over-taking without caution and with too much bravura.

Rita and Kath squeal giddily propelling themselves out of the back doors of the car after Steve parks. She waits for him to get out first, conscious of the wet patches her legs will leave behind her. The girls have already run ahead to join Rita’s parents and other cousins who have set themselves up on the beach earlier in the day. She helps him collect towels and bags from the boot of the car.

Got any new jokes, he asks her as they walk towards to the beach.

What is Bruce Lee’s favourite drink?

No idea, kid.

Wataaaaaaah!!

That ironic smile again. Why does he tease her like this. She decides not to talk to him any more for the rest of the day. She really does hate him now.

Her cousins are happy to see her. She and her sister join them every summer for a few weeks in a beach house they rent in Safety Beach. She and Kath commute from the country where they live. Steve is not always present at these family gatherings, but she was secretly excited that he would be picking them up at Spencer Street Station this time and that they would spend time together. But the drive has disconcerted her and she feels confused and upset and loses herself in the lunch preparations and sandwich making. She turns to Carmel, Rita’s sister, who is a year older than she is.

Why is your brother such a dick these days?

What do you mean ‘these days’? He’s always a dick.

He thought he was Sterling Moss on the drive down here. I thought I was going to vomit.

She had no idea who Sterling Moss was, but she had heard her mother say this about her father’s driving.

He’s just frustrated because he doesn’t have a girlfriend.

Really? He doesn’t have a girlfriend?

Well, not one he would be inclined to bring home.

She and Carmel have covered their bodies in coconut oil and are sunning themselves at the edge of the sand which is becoming sodden with the incoming tide. She notices grains of sand dotting the surface of her skin and she brushes them away. They stick to her hands defiantly.

Do you think he’s had sex?

I have no idea, but he’s pretty sure he’s had sex in his own head. Who cares anyway? Have you had sex?

Not yet, but I went with a guy at school last year. My friends dared me to kiss him which I did. Then he dropped me. But, I haven’t had sex. What about you?

Are you crazy? Do I look like I want to get pregnant?

I know, but aren’t you curious?

I want to wait for the right guy. For the guy I marry.

Ok.

Carmel gets up to dip herself into the cool water. She’s glowing red and mumbles something about heading under the umbrellas where her parents are snoozing.

I’m going for a walk. I’ll join you later, she tells her.

Her feet grip the rough edges of the rock pool while she peers into the water, spotting little crabs and necklaces of seaweed.

I heat up, I can’t cool down  

You got me spinning
‘Round and ‘round
‘Round and ‘round and ‘round it goes
Where it stops nobody knows

Every time you call my name
I heat up like a burning flame
Burning flame full of desire
Kiss me baby, let the fire get higher

Abra abracadabra
I wanna reach out and grab ya
Abracadabra
Abracadabra

What are you doing?

Ow! She turns so suddenly her foot catches on the rough edges of the rocks.

Nothing. You shouldn’t creep up on people like that.

You shouldn’t act like such a weirdo.

Get stuffed.

She turns her back on him, kneeling and cupping the cool sea water to her forehead and her cheeks. He sits next to her, letting his legs dip into the rock pool. She unwinds and mirrors him slowly, losing her balance and grabbing his outstretched hand. They sit without talking, the only audible sounds their breathing, the voices of children and the unstoppable waves.

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Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

Prompts Exercise

Once upon a time there was an opportunity.

It was hard to see it coming but when it arrived it was impossible to ignore. She watched others circumnavigate it. Pointing or reaching to touch it tentatively.

A hearty laugh stopped short of bubbling out of her. She was holding back.

Every day she had anticipated this moment and, so, was ready. Calm and watchful, excited, but without the anxiety others seemed to have. The room rippled. She watched as one man taunted the opportunity daring it to strike out, before ducking behind lace curtains like some grotesquely obvious party trick. The others tittered.

One day, some time ago, she had seen people react this way in even lesser circumstances. Awed by looking outside – a window of opportunity. That day she had remained silent, demure. She nodded and oohed when prompted but felt little. That wasn’t true, she felt contemplative- imagining what it would be like when the opportunity arrived, when it was brought inside. Would it knock?

Because of that, her previous silence, her feigned awe – the room fell still when she strode with purpose across the room and looked this opportunity in the eye. They both stood still. There was a moment of doubt but it didn’t last. She looked at opportunity face on, she could feel it’s warmth.

And, because of that, she reached out and petted it. A soft, warm pulse of pleasure. The room gasped but took no steps to move, to intervene.

Until finally it was clear to everyone that this was in fact her opportunity. She had won it, coaxing it onto her lap. Enjoying its warmth, it’s promise to grow into something formidable, fierce and proud. While it was hers, it was also theirs, she acknowledged. It was their missed opportunity.

Exercise one
A private softening in a public space ….
I watch his solid silence, his unyielding self – hard with stubble, caked with plaster scum – unsmiling. Macho. I do not know him, his wife, his child, their lives. Eating zaatar in a cafe in Coburg. Tired, ordinary. His two year old girl child reaches across – clutching for his food ignoring her own.
With her movement he comes back to this world – our shared world- differently. Alive, he smiles at her, at inside her. He changes to another self, laughing at her need of him and reaches across the table.  He picks her up. Both are gleeful. Her diamanted shoes kick over a salt shaker. He feeds her gently – his pastry, the very same pastry she didn’t want from her plate. He is better for holding her – she is better for being held- feeding.
But I wonder how long they will see each other so clearly, so purely. I wonder how long he will remain vulnerable to her and his clear need to be needed.

Exercise two

Stopping. Stopping short. Topping snort. Naught topping. Aught to be napping.
Why. Why not. Whine. Whinge. Whine. I’ll drink to that!
Sigh. Inward breath. Sign-in ward – clinical.

Back to stopping.

Stretching. Stretching the truth. The truth of stretching the truth – is stopping, stopping short.

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Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

If I had 6 months to live, what would I do and what is stopping me from doing it now.

Well… I would finish the writing job I’ve been cradling for eight years this very evening and I’d quit work before the last bell sounds. I would spend a day with my family and another with my friends. Then I would travel with her and her alone and see beautiful things, ugly things and real things. I would eat great meals and pull the piss out of important things. I would laugh and cry and be with her. I’d shag, smoke, and be rollickingly drunk for probably most of the time and bore people senseless with what I reckon they should do. Pointlessly pontificating in bars and coffee shops. I’d stand by an open fire and at some other point read a book to a little kid, that I loved, and ignite that same love for them. I’d say goodbye. I’d probably spend at least a day being annoyed that I was going to die and infuriated that so many empty coats were going to keep on living. Why don’t I do this today? Because my two cats are hungry and need food; so I have a job, which I actually quite like if I’m honest. I don’t do this today because I’m playing a longer game. So I sit by a fire – but not every day. Standing silently masking how unintellectual I really am with others doing the same in a rehearsed, beautiful, plastic dance. I get drunk, when I’m not trying to not lose weight and I’d read a book to that friends kid, but I don’t want to force it. I’m not bound by time, and I’m pretty driven – so things are happening fast enough… mostly…I have a beginning and I’m working on the middle. The end will take care of itself.

Frank

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Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

I started the day with a gorgeous sleep in – wait, no sleep in, scrap that, I woke with the all-encompassing dread that Olive, my mental one-year-old would be waking any second and I would have to be at her service all over again. I thought that this day would be no exception to the usual – the clock would 4-something-am and as I allowed that revolting time sink in, I would start to hear her demands for my attention get louder and louder.

I slowly and reluctantly opened my eyes and it wasn’t 4-something-am – it was5:45-fucking-am and Olive was not making a sound. There was silence in my house and I was awake and Old Mate wasn’t. What the fuck was happening? I slammed my eyes shut again, buried my head into my pillow and hoped to return to the depths of sleep, but alas, the sheer excitement and disbelief that I was awake before her, combined with the prospect that that bloody whinge would fill my ears any moment kept me wide awake. I may as well have just sucked on a fired up, filthy crack pipe, because my eyes were darting around my scrunched up eye lids and my heart was racing faster than every Hill Song member’s as they watched Guy Sebastian on Eurovision. It was in that perplexed and ecstatic moment that I wouldn’t have been surprised if my face exploded in the most aggressive nose bleed that ever existed.

Admitting defeat that sleep was gone forever, I reluctantly picked up my phone from my bedside table and scrolled through emails that I can’t for the life of me care about regarding some patronising baby club I accidentally signed up to in a moment of sleep deprivation and desperation. I then found myself navigating my way through the mindlessness of Facebook – through the lives of high school acquaintances that I didn’t give a fuck about ten years ago, but ironically find myself clicking on photos to see what they named their new fox terrier or what shit Canberra café they just went to. Eggs Florentine? Is that making a comeback?

How do I even pretend to care about this? What has become of me? In the comfort of my own bed, I found myself embarrassed in front of myself – a feeling that is becoming more and more frequent these days.

I pulled myself out of bed and dragged myself to the bathroom, stepping over the exploded box of bulk tampons Olive has recently become obsessed with. A smile appears on my face as I remember that when bathing her last night she sat triumphantly in the water with three tampons wedged in her fat fingers and one unwrapped and bulging one in her mouth. I sat on the toilet and I pissed as quietly as I could hoping to prolong the moments of solitude I had amazingly scored. As I pondered whether it was gross not to flush a consuming thought dawned upon me – the silence could actually mean that she was dead. As I listened to the tiny snores seep through the bathroom wall, I started to breathe again, but stood frozen.

As I stood over the toilet bowl of my own piss, I wondered what my life would be like without her. What would I stay silent for then? It was an isolating, deafening thought that made me realise that the silence that I found myself in was a silence like no other. It may not be a silence where I am solving the world, or even thinking about anything productive – it’s the place where I can hear myself, even over the niggling noises of Facebook shit and baby product emails. This was the silence I loved, but find myself always searching for it to end.

This silence reminded me that I am alive, but even better, it reminded me that someone else is.

You can find Bron’s blog at:www.blastedbron.blogspot.com.au

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Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

10pm she said.

Write something and send it to me by 10pm.

Shit. It’s already 5. I have an evening planned. I can’t make that deadline. Shame she hadn’t given us twenty-four hours; or at least twelve.

By the time I get home, calm the dog, feed the dog, check my emails. Facebook. Instagram. Pink Sofa. Have a shower. Make myself look happy.

And I have to go to Dan and Peta’s tonight. I promised, and they are off to Outer Oona-Gularby Shits-ville in two weeks, so I can’t cancel. I might not see them for a year

Nuh. I haven’t got time to tap out some fancy bit of prose and get it off to Catherine Deveny tonight.

Not tonight.

Easy for her to say. Does she forget we all have lives? And dogs and Dan’s and Peta’s

Shit.
And I had some brilliant ideas too.

Could easily have whipped them up if I only had a bit more time.

I was going to rant, because that’s what women do, about how I had just been to a Gunnas master class and it had changed my life.

Hell, I realized today that I could be the creative I really wanted to be. If only I didn’t have to feed the dog, walk the dog, check my social media, and get to Dan and Pete’s by 6:30.

Universe, for so long I have thanked you for handing down a better than average life to me. You’ve been a brick.

So I’m not sure if you were asleep on the fucking job, or I’ve done something to piss you off. Either way, 18 months ago you really fucked me up.

I’m blaming you because my counselor says I can’t blame my ex, and I’m perfect so it can’t be my fault.

So, I think I have done a fair job of not falling over since then, though shit there has been days when I could have checked out.

But you know, I always had that bloody dog to feed and those Dan’s and Peta’s to see…

So the life I wanted, had always envisioned for myself, and had planned with my partner, has been on the back burner. For so long now that it’s burnt to high hell, the pot is ruined and the only think to do is chuck it out and start again.

Today, I’m a new woman.

Seriously.

Universe, laugh your arse off. Go ahead

I’ve seen the light, turned over a new leaf and am embracing all the clichés, I can round up.

I know it is easy to talk the talk, but I have found the strength, with help from an arsey classy woman in a sexy, body huggy, tealy number with a red rose on her rack.

From now onwards I am going to crawl the crawl, walk the walk, and one day soon I’m going to run the run. While walking the dog.

On the way to Pete and Dan’s.

Tonight a deadline. Tomorrow a lifeline

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Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer
My name is Denise. My mother’s name is Maureen and she has Alzheimer’s. She’s 68 years old.

Alzheimer’s has been an ever present darkness in my family’s life for the past decade. It has tainted every occasion we’ve shared – weddings, anniversaries, graduations, births, every Mother’s Day, Christmas, etc…. We live with the protracted loss and unspeakable grief that comes with caring for my mother, advocating for her, trying to make the decisions she would have made, losing her piece by piece, loving her, missing her, yet wishing for her escape.

I wish I could tell her story, but I would never dare – I have no right. All I have is my piece of her story, my experience of it, the part I know.

Just as I became old enough to start asking the right questions, she stopped being able to answer them. Just as my ‘real’ life was starting, she rapidly lost her ability to enjoy and participate in it. After years of longing and planning for grandchildren, she was scarcely able to enjoy my son. She will never know my unborn daughter. I will never know the wisdom she would certainly have shared once we were both mothers. I feel her absence in moments large and small. She is my mother but no longer my mum.

Something as hideous and destructive as Alzheimer’s should announce itself loudly so you can brace yourself.

It started 12 years ago. At first it crept slowly into our lives. Only with the perfect clarity of retrospect did we recognise the signs. Confusion in car parks, strange reactions to daily events, repeating the same story from yesterday’s phone call. It took a couple of years for the symptoms to become so clear that we could no longer ignore them.

The subtle changes were barely perceptible to people who weren’t us. For a long time mum, like many people living with dementia, was very good at hiding it. Even her closest friends found it hard to believe the diagnosis. Before too long those same friends were so confronted by her decline that they beat a silent but hasty retreat just when they were needed most.

I don’t know where this is going. I don’t know if it’s going anywhere at all. All I know is that I wish there had been something for me to read so I’d felt less alone, benefitted from others lessons and had a clearer sense of what was to come. I guess that’s what I’m trying to write. It’s a start.

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Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

It started with a green neck pillow at The Australian Geographic shop. Only I didn’t know it then. I didn’t know that it was the beginning, or really the beginning of the end of things as I knew it. It was just an ugly looking thing on display in the window. Shaped like a U. Green plush one side, green and white stripes on the other. And yet I was strangely drawn to it. I felt like I had to buy it. I didn’t know why I would so I walked on. But then I came back. It was coming up to Christmas and I thought of buying it for mum for a present. It wasn’t her style but I just knew I had to buy it for her.

I remembered that she was going on her first post retirement camper van trip with my dad. They were going to travel around Tasmania. They had worked hard all their lives and it was time to take a break. The business mum had set up and taken from a hobby sideline to a national business was finally sold. It was their time and they were excited to go together, even though she had already managed to drive my dad nuts by writing all over the cupboards what was going to go in them. They were leaving in the New Year. Surely a long driving holiday would need a neck pillow? So I bought it.

She loved it. She thought it would be really handy. She was always a practical woman.

So they left on their trip.

And one night my mum rang really late which was unusual. I was watching an Agatha Christie movie and they were getting to the part where they tell you who done it. So I didn’t want to talk. I was dismissive. She sounded odd. She didn’t realise what time it was. She said that she had been sick with some strange virus and that her neck was aching all the time. She was ringing to tell me that she was so grateful for the neck pillow as it was bringing her some relief.

I never knew what that conversation was. I didn’t know it was the last time I would talk to her. So I said “yeh that’s great, gotta go, talk soon” But of course I never got to. I didn’t even tell her that I loved her. But I sadly never really did back then.

We didn’t know it at the time but the neck pain wasn’t a virus but septicaemia poisoning her blood and travelling around her veins. In a few days she would have a massive fever and by the time she made it to hospital it would already be too late. It would travel to her heart and fire off a blood clot that would travel to her brain and lead her to have a massive stroke. She was already dying but no one knew it.

3 days later I am on the toilet and my partner barges in with the phone. I scream at him to get out. He says I need to ring my dad. He says its urgent. My hand is trembling as I dial the number. My hand is trembling and then all of me is. I am meant to be getting ready for work but instead now I am booking a flight to Tasmania. On the plane my stricken face gives me away and a passenger gives me a pillow. She says “sometimes you just need something to hold onto, it will help”. I am holding that pillow as I ask for my mum to hold onto her life.

When I get to the hospital she is in Intensive Care but I am not shocked by the way that she looks. My stepson had been in ICU after a car accident (because 15 years olds without a license aren’t meant to be driving!) and he was now back playing footy. So everything would be ok. Mum would of course also recover from this. I would move down to the coast and be with her. I would help out with whatever rehab she might need. I would be there. I would dedicate my life to getting her back. And everything would of course be fine.

But it isn’t. The Dr announces to us casually, like its nothing and with a coldness that would always astound me, that the bleeding in her brain is extreme. That there would be no chance of recovery. And then he walked away, leaving us to reel in our shock and grief. I ring my brother who is overseas. All he can do is write her a letter for me to read. I print it off and draw the curtain trying to gain some privacy for the reading.

We need to turn off her life support. We decide to do it the following morning. I spend the night in her room and we watch Lewis on the TV. We always loved British murder mysteries. I will come to name my child after this movie and after this moment. I sleep in a chair by the bed holding her hand. Every now and then I will wake thinking that I have been having a nightmare, only to remember that I am living it.

We flip the switches. I expect it to be like at the movies. The family stands around and the heart monitor beeps slowly then flat lines and we all cry and say at least we got to be here. At least we got to say goodbye.

But that isn’t what happens. In fact nothing much happens at all. After a few hours they finally turn the sound off the equipment as the constant alarms and beeping feels like a chisel in between my eyes.

And so I sit. And I wait. I am scared to go eat. To go to the toilet. To have a shower. I do nothing but listen to every death rattle breath wondering if it will be the last one. I then realise that I wouldn’t even know if it was the last one until she never took another and I would never be able to say that I saw the exact moment that she died. So then I cant take my eyes away from her chest. And the breaths get fewer and further apart. But they still come. When I think it is over, and I hold my breath along with hers, she would eventually gasp again.

I get a lesson in life going on as I get my period. It doesn’t care about death or that I don’t want to have to take the time to go to the shops.

I sit there and my belly button ring gets infected because I am so run down. My mum hated that belly button ring. I think she is having a last ditch attempt to get me to remove it. I laugh and cry at the same time. I tell her its no good and that I’m keeping it in. I talk to her like she can hear me because no one says that she cant.

I am cold and uncomfortable because as I frantically packed for this unexpected journey I packed a nice skirt for a funeral rather than the trackies and ugg boots that I really needed.

I sit there so long that I want to scream “just hurry up and fucking die already!” at the same time that I so hope that it is all a mistake and that she will prove us all wrong.

I watch her lose lots of weight as they aren’t feeding her anything and I worry that she is starving to death. I watch as they put stuff in her mouth and she flinches which makes hope rise in my chest that she is going to be ok. Until they explain that it is just an involuntary movement, like a reflex. That it doesn’t mean anything.

I accidently catch sight of her feet and they are purple as the extremities are dying first. She will come to me in a few weeks time in a dream and we will both stand by her bed looking at her lying there and she will ask “what happened to my feet?” and I will explain it to her as it was explained to me. She was never meant to die. She would never have expected it. My vibrant, life loving, gym going, teetotaller mum who survived breast cancer and who was on her first retirement trip was not meant to be in lying in a hospital bed with her feet turning purple. We all needed it explained.

I rage about the unfairness. I cry about my future children that she will never get to meet. I feel sorry for myself that I have never had any grandparents, aunts, uncles or cousins. That all I have is an absent brother and a broken dad. That I am losing the person who loved me the best and held us together. That my first real experience with grief is with the big guns. I sing her “Fly Away Little Bird”, a song a friend had put on my iPod because I liked the Indigo Girls, not because she thought it would ever be sung at a death bed.

And then I watch DVD box sets. I only ever need to get to end of an episode at a time. I never have to plan anything further. If I get to the end and I’m not ready to face life I can put on another. Life is in manageable, episodic chucks. Things get resolved in 45 minutes. Usually the good guy wins, or finds redemption or kicks some vampire butt. And so it goes through the days and nights as they now don’t have any separation. The DVD Box Set Approach to Grief is a strategy that will serve me well over the coming months. And when a friend goes through something horrible I buy them a JB HiFi voucher rather than flowers.

For five days I sit there. For five days she fights on. I honour my mum with my sitting. I tell her how much she meant to me by the way that I stay.

Eventually I of course have to go for a break and the call comes that she has died. When I get there she still feels warm and like she always did. And I am grateful for the green neck pillow. Sometimes you just really need something to hold onto.

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Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

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Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

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Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

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