Hope Shines Read online

  Contents

  Foreword by Quentin Bryce AD CVO

  Introduction by Conny Lenneberg

  Like Dresses in a Tree

  Finegan Kruckemeyer

  The Girl Who Wanted to Paint the Moon

  Tess Rowley

  MESSERSCHMITT

  Kim Kelly

  Saltwater

  Alice Bishop

  Lilly of the Locust Fields

  Melanie Crouch

  Run

  Vicky Daddo

  Radiance

  Elisa Hall

  Biographies of the British Monarchy

  Eleanor George

  The Space Between Stillness and Sleep

  Jenny Pang

  We Will Go On

  Veronica Hester

  Help create lasting change

  About the Brotherhood of St Laurence

  Foreword

  The Honourable Quentin Bryce AD CVO

  Like my fellow judges, Kate Grenville and Cate Blanchett, I was deeply moved by the stories in Hope Shines, the new collection of writing drawn from the very best entries into the Brotherhood of St Laurence Hope Prize.

  I love all that this prize signifies. It encourages both writers and readers to contemplate and appreciate the many forms that hope takes in our lives. When circumstances are dire or it feels as though life is delivering one harsh blow after another, hope can be like a flicker to light the way forward.

  In the tough gullies, spark can be generated by a simple act of kindness – a gentle word, a helping hand, thoughtful guidance delivered just at the right moment. We can inspire hope in others with a warm and understanding smile, meeting the eyes of stranger who looks dejected, sharing a joke. Sometimes hope needs a greater act to fan its comforting flame – refuge from a violent partner, a first job for a young unemployed teen, a helping hand through education and training, a safe place to call home.

  Father Gerard Tucker, founder of the Brotherhood, believed that each one of us, regardless of our background, our age or our economic situation should be able to live a life of purpose and inclusion; be part of the community; live the life of hope. For some of us, made vulnerable by old age or poverty, illness or displacement, the helping hand of hope can be the difference between life and death.

  Martin Luther King famously said, ‘Everything that is done in this world is done by hope.’ Across my life I have come to believe that this is indeed true.

  Introduction

  Conny Lenneberg, Executive Director, Brotherhood of St Laurence

  A sense of hope can be fragile and tenuous, at times elusive, even in the prosperous corner of the world we live in. If you are struggling to find secure work, to pay your rent or are socially isolated, it can be corrosive for personal confidence and feelings of hope. At the Brotherhood of St Laurence, we see this every day in our work. But, equally, we see the rays of hope in the extraordinary potential people have to turn their lives around.

  As a community, we all need to take the time to really ‘see’ the people pushed to the margins of our society. When we learn not to blame, to explore people’s aspirations and genuinely connect, there is so much potential to turn around a human narrative.

  Let me share one story that stays with me: a young man with learning difficulties who was so bullied at school that he just stopped attending. Living in an outer suburb, and with few friends his own age, the teenager literally retreated to his bedroom. And he mostly stayed there – for months.

  Yet his potential couldn’t be written off, and with the intervention of the right support services and new connections, he was eventually coaxed back into the world he had retreated from. The teenager joined one of our youth employment programs and is now flourishing, realising the potential he always had. He has found a job, new confidence and meaning. He has a real sense of hope.

  There are so many arcs of hope in the community, and that is why we created The Hope Prize, to encourage nuanced writing that captures the resilience of the human spirit amid adversity and hardship. We wanted to collect the stories that defy conventional stereotypes of ‘the poor’ and reflect the humanity, resilience and capacity for hope we know that people – and communities – show in difficult times.

  This is the second time our short story competition has been run, thanks to the generous philanthropy of the late Prue Myer and her family. We were overwhelmed by nearly 900 stories from talented writers all over Australia. As you can imagine, choosing a shortlist proved a tough task. This anthology showcases the best work.

  I thank our wonderful judging panel comprising Cate Blanchett, Quentin Bryce and Kate Grenville for their participation in this unique project. We have also had the generous support of Mark Rubbo, Managing Director of Readings book chain, and Dan Ruffino, Managing Director of Simon & Schuster Australia, the publisher of this inspiring book.

  Like Dresses in a Tree

  Finegan Kruckemeyer

  First Prize

  She was not meant for children – one doctor after another had said it – and so her husband had left.

  He walked to the letterbox, to the end of the garden – the box was empty, he turned and stared, she waved pleasantly from the window, then he opened the rusted gate and was gone. Soon he was living with a lady across town, who smoked a pipe and hung torn dresses from her tree to scare the crows away.

  The woman left was a practical one though, and she went and knocked on the door of his new home. He answered and shook his head pityingly.

  ‘I’m here now. Don’t make things any harder.’

  The woman leant sideways, dodging his words and in the same action seeing over his shoulder and down the length of the corridor.

  ‘Lucy. Lucy Sykes – I see you back there in the kitchen, standing over those potatoes. I didn’t come for trouble. I came for trade.’

  She waited patiently on the porch while her once-husband whispered with his now-woman, and finally Lucy came – though she carried a skillet with her, swinging it casually like it was just a cooking thing not put down, but known by both to be a fighting tool should claws come out.

  ‘You can put down the pan, girl, or keep it in your hand, it doesn’t matter to me. You have him now and I offer equal parts congratulation and condolence – he’s a good kisser, but a weak one for lifting things. Anyway, love talk doesn’t pass well between the once-had and the now-has, so I’ll get to business.

  You’ve been single six years before him and I imagine your house is set up in that fashion. Only now there’s two of you and you’ll be needing twice the bed at night and an extra chair come breakfast time. So here’s my offer: trade me your single things – your one chair, your thin bed, your fork, spoon, knife – and in return I’ll hand over my doubles that fit a man and woman well. And to balance out the lopsidedness of that transaction, you give me those dresses hanging in the tree there.’

  It was a good deal, no denying, so the transaction was made, and the furniture and bits and bobs set up each in their new homes. Which only left the collecting of the dresses, and to the man between the two this job went. He climbed begrudgingly, dropped all garments down to his past lover, and then slipped and fell on the way back to earth. The leg was broke in two places and a long stretch of bed-rest followed. The man pined during these days for that pipe-smoking woman to warm the place beside him, but without the dresses flapping, she was left to fend off the crows, who turned her garden bare of fruit and spared her no time for cuddling.

  The man, abandoned so, lay in that new, old bed – double the size yes, but half-filled all the same. And he smelled the once-woman on the sheets, he saw the indent formed by her over all those years of lying. And he knew this now-woman could never fill it. Realising wrongs committed, he hobbled to the letterbox t
hat held no mail, past the plants that bore no fruit, and beyond the woman whose smoking cough hacked at the cool day air. And again, he closed a gate. Again, he walked.

  The roles reversed, she greeted him at her door this time and again he said it:

  ‘I’m here now. Don’t make things any harder.’

  And without a word she let him in, and showed him what his once-house had become. A thin bed made for one, books piled around it that only she liked reading. Here a table shrunk to suit a spinster, there a chair that had no partner, on the stove a kettle boiled with water just enough for a single cup of tea.

  ‘And so you see,’ said she to him, ‘it isn’t even a matter of choice anymore. You just don’t fit.’

  And politely she waited with screen door held, as he guppy-fished his mouth devoid of words, and turned his simple head in each direction, looking for a bit that might be his. But finally one must reconcile themselves to the shifting state of things, and the ripples in the pond, and the general fact that mistakes are mistakes, and a broken shin can’t change this. And he hobbled out as he had hobbled in, and walked a garden path again, and passed a letterbox again, and stood beside a bin that held a pile of discarded frocks, their purpose served. And the man – he held a gate again, unsure.

  The woman heard the kettle whistle and was gone, without waiting to see which way her hinges swung.

  She was not meant for children – one doctor after another had said it – and so she busied herself with other things.

  The woman, who was Nella Sands, had long since forgotten about the man, and closed her ears to the gossip spoke, and settled into her solitary life, single-bedded and untroubled. Her once-husband, she heard, had cut down the tree in Lucy Syke’s front yard, with sure and angry axe swings. Then he and she had settled on the porch, in matching chairs, and watched over the seasons as the crows ate what they wished. They said little, this dull-spirited pair, and in that silence found a peace that surprised all. They were not happy, this is true enough to say, but happiness is a bedfellow to change and evolution, and these two were too still for that. They sat in a stasis, and it fit them well.

  Nella gave herself to small rituals, well-rationed. At dawn she rose and walked her garden, checking on the plants. The kettle’s whistle brought her in, the same cup was held in two curved hands, and the tea was sipped until it was a gulping temperature – then it was gulped. So impressed were the townsfolk with her quiet way that they took it to be wisdom and came to visit in their ones and twos and threes. Nella, still possessed of practicality, knew she needed food to eat and firewood to burn, and took to leaving a coin jar on the inside of the front door.

  This way any man or lady could wander in (knocking became a formality soon forgotten) and vent their problems to the woman, and have those same words spoken back in a slightly shuffled order that made them seem imbued with sense. Relieved, they would depart unburdened and, on noticing the jar (or on noticing the woman’s polite cough if not) pat their pockets, find some coin, and drop it in.

  Sometimes, someone would stumble in so laden down with guilt or shock or despair or love that they could not even conjure words. And Nella Sands would point them to the chair and sit them, and stare at them from the doorway with arms crossed. Or she would take them by the elbow to the garden and walk with them a lap of it, studying her plants but studying also her company and what species their eyes fell on first. Or she would lie them on her single bed and ruminate upon their horizontal form. And eventually she would have it.

  ‘It is your daughter. You fear for her heart in the hands of this man she loves.’

  ‘It is your husband. You feel an echoing gulf between you and he as you face each other at the dinner table.’

  ‘It is your dog. It does not run to you when entering the kitchen anymore.’

  ‘It is the weather.’

  ‘It is a man you owe money who waits outside your house with chin raised high.’

  ‘It is the rain.’

  ‘It is the ghost of your grandmother who watches as you lie in bed each night.’

  And every time her words were just the thing. And she would coax the story from them, and watch it form, and treat it in a way that soothed the carrier. And then cough politely, receive her pennies, and send them out the door.

  Eventually this silent knowing came to surpass the conversationed one, and she would ask that a visitor say nothing, and instead just sit, or stand, or lie, or garden-walk, until she found the root. Nella Sands was a gardener of the human condition, and she could prune the worry from you.

  She was not meant for children – one doctor after another had said it – but none from that profession had cared to tell the man who entered town.

  It was a long time that Nella Sands had been divining the inner workings of her fellow townsfolk, and collectively it could be said that her gift had worked its wonders exponentially. The men who had once come home from offices filled to the brim with bottled-up anger, filled so full it sloshed over the sides and caused the chairs to bust and kids to cling to mother-legs, now entered sated, and made quarrel with no one.

  Those women who had been beset by fidgety anxiety – with nails bit low, and cheeks gaunt, and a shaky desperation in their eyes – now glided down the footpaths of the town, a saintly promenade. The skittish children had been calmed, and so it stood to reason that their poor parents breathed a little calmer also. The pulse of the whole town beat a little slower, and it was Nella Sands and her all-knowing gaze that made it so.

  Nella minded none, and liked the notoriety, if her humble way would allow it to be known. Her penny jar stood mostly full, most of the time, and an observant passer-by might note new shingles on her porch-roof, and the planting of rare and hard-to-chance-upon species climbing from her garden soil.

  She enjoyed also this knowing of things, for it was a true and real gift she had. And she felt herself a kindred spirit to the thin-mustachioed clock-mender who kept a store on the main road – she, like he, understood that process of opening up a thing, of studying its many tiny parts and, in reading how the cogs conjoined, of coming to know the larger form and why it ran the way it did. The people were her clocks, and she kept them all in time.

  But her belly, it held nothing, and this thought sat a little heavier in her head than others might. Alas, for bellies to grow, one requires processes that single beds sit poorly with, and people with whom to discover this, and so it only stood to reason that sooner or later, in whatever form chance might dictate, this person would come.

  It was while all slept on a Sunday night, and suckled at their thumbs, and dreamt of facts and fancies, that he showed himself. The stranger came carried on a bicycle, and laden down with wicker crates, and hid beneath a leaning hat, and smelling of a sipping liquor that had evolved into a swigging one, if strength of stench was any guessing. He sang a song that was truly beautiful, and the sleeping ones in beds nearby sighed happy as it climbed inside their dreams. The song was of the sea, and salt crystals sat upon the words that passed into the windows. Those in bed licked their lips and tasted distant waves.

  The riding, it got slower, as the strain showed on the drunken man. And eventually inertia had its way, and the bicycle tipped and settled its passenger in the gutter. A wise man would have laughed then at the silliness of such a thing – the man laughed. He climbed out from beneath his bike, then fixed his hat – which had landed straight – back to a sloping angle, and staggered to an alleyway. ‘Stay,’ he told the bicycle, then laughed, then hiccupped, then slid down the wall as tiredness placed a caring hand upon his shoulder and bade him go to ground. Collapsed inside these shadows, he said a silent prayer (that was to no single god, but rather all of them at once) for getting him happily through another day and, smiling at the stars, he slept.

  He was not meant for children – one time after another he had said it – but still the thought came to him often, in his dreams.

  The sunlight was a cruel thing as it cut across his eyelid
s, and Isaac Forbes muttered some words that were for no god to be hearing, and lifted himself. Glancing down the alleyway, he saw his bicycle, no longer in the gutter but now stood up carefully against a lamp post.

  And from this simple repositioning he understood instantly all that might be known about this town – this town that gave itself to the righting of collapsed things. ‘That is a pleasure,’ said Isaac to himself, and he knew he might linger here a while.

  The town was called Dempsey, as the shop signs helped to tell him, and its main business was an orchard valley and a river – the fruit picked in one would be floated down the other, in big, heavy boats that didn’t care if it was today or a hundred years before. They were captained by old men with curved spines, and their crew were the quiet, young ones who’d left school early because it asked too many questions. You looked any one of them in the eye in silence, and he’d hold your gaze forever. But say a word and he’d stare out along the river and make it seem like you’d never been there at all.

  As he walked down the main street that first time, Isaac noticed the white shops and the big pair of scissors hanging outside the hairdresser and Rhoda in the wheelchair in front of her mum’s bar and the bridge and the trees and the season he was sure was different two miles back. The river was a sloth that day and the boats did not need tying. The fruit was a third ripe on the branches, and the schoolboys sat beneath them, teaching each other swear words. ‘Your face is an arse and there’s nothing you can do,’ was what they said that day.

  Isaac sat in a park, on a bench, for some hours, taking it all in. And then – with a new day’s thirst now dawning – he cut across to Barbara’s and nodded to the girl in the chair and walked in the door and pulled out a stool and had a beer the name of which was unknown to him.

  Barbara asked how he was, and he said good. And then she asked if he was passing through, and again it was short, just a ‘Yes, ma’am’ and a nod to round it off. But already it was there: the hint of something far-reaching stretching out from this nothing moment, like maybe one day again he’d sit and Barbara would ask how he was, and again he’d say good. Only this time it would be twenty years later and his hair would be a different colour and he would be calmer and someone would be sat beside him.