Hope Shines Read online

Every Friday morning I walked to the grocery shop pushing the baby in his pram. I had a shopping list and money in a brown envelope all placed inside a cloth bag, which I handed over to Mr Green, the shopkeeper.

  ‘And what have we here, young lady?’ he asked, studying the list. He was a round, jolly man who wore a white cloth apron tied round his middle, making his belly look even bigger.

  If the baby fell asleep on the way back, Mrs Loftus would say, ‘Good girl, now I can get something done!’

  One day I noticed a tin of paints with a colouring book in the girls’ bedroom. I waited till their afternoon sleep, took the newly found treasures and crept outside to the veranda. My chores quickly forgotten, I dipped into the tiny squares of colour and filled in the pictures.

  This continued for a few weeks.

  ‘Biddy, when did you last dust the furniture?’ Her voice sounded tired.

  ‘Er, I’m not sure, Mrs.’

  ‘Get the duster.’

  I couldn’t remember where I’d left it.

  She opened the colouring book. ‘Did you do these paintings?’

  My heart sank. She’d seen my pictures!

  ‘Yes, Mrs. I’m sorry.’ I was shaking.

  She stood silent for a moment. ‘Get some work done now before the girls wake.’

  I worked so fast to fix up the mess. I was thankful Mrs Loftus hadn’t flogged me.

  A few days later, arriving at work, Mr Loftus met me at the front door. He wore a suit and tie. His thin moustache traced the shape of his mouth. ‘Your employment is terminated. You’re no longer required here.’

  Shocked, I stood looking at him and blinked back tears.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr,’ I stammered.

  ‘I can’t have you stealing my girls’ toys. I hope you’ll learn a lesson from this.’ He stepped back, closing the door behind him.

  Dejectedly, I turned around to leave. Mrs Loftus appeared from the side of the house.

  ‘Goodbye, Biddy. You’re a good girl,’ she whispered. Her eyes were red and watery. Handing me a present wrapped in brown paper, she placed her finger to her lips, mouthing shush.

  When I reached the street corner, I tore the parcel open. Inside were five silver tubes of paint labelled black, white, red, yellow and blue.

  I searched everywhere around the camp looking for cartons to cut up and paint, but clean cartons were hard to find.

  I walked to town each day looking for work, knocking on doors. Sometimes I’d get a job weeding or raking leaves and come home with a bit of cooked meat or bread. Some days – nothing.

  Trudging home one hot afternoon, thirsty and hungry, I saw it! An old hub cap, right there, on the side of the road. It had a big tin dinner-plate-size centre. Short spikes stretched out to the rim. Shivering with excitement, I carried it home. My hands were greasy black from holding it. I scrubbed that hub cap as if my life depended on it, taking care to clean every crevice. Then I laid it in the sun to dry. It shone like silver. I had found the moon!

  ‘What ya got there?’ my cousin asked.

  I didn’t answer, just sat guard, admiring the many shapes. I decorated it with the paints. My brushes were twigs and sticks. I painted for days, taking great care. The hub cap landscaped the story of my birth, my people and my land. Each thin silver spike became a star circling my dreamtime moon.

  I took the finished hub cap to town and showed Mr Green. He put it in the window and gave me bread and a tin of plum jam. Back home I was so excited to tell my story that everyone started eating the bread and jam before I could get a slice. I didn’t mind because they left me the two crusts, my favourite part of the bread.

  It was weeks before I found another hub cap, but I always looked, and hated going home empty handed. My brothers searched too, and when they found one I was so happy. Each silver moon was different. Some had bracelet-size centres, with thick legs curling outwards like starfish. I stared at each prize for hours, willing it to tell me what it was meant to be. I gave those hub caps back their stories through my painting. The shopman started to sell them, giving me groceries to take home.

  My hub caps were getting famous, hung in other shops and the library in town.

  One day, Mr Green asked, ‘Why don’t you learn how to do real paintings?’

  ‘How’d I do that? I ain’t got no money.’

  ‘There’s new rules now to help you kids. I’ll find out what I can,’ he promised.

  ‘Biddy, I’ve a letter here from an art teacher. You’ve to go to a school in town.’ He sounded excited. ‘He wants to meet you.’

  He gave me a dollar note. ‘You’ll need this for the bus and a bit of tucker.’

  I didn’t sleep for days, thinking about it all, worrying what I would say. I felt sick in the stomach.

  But the teacher who interviewed me was really kind. I answered all his questions. Finally, he smiled and shook my hand. ‘I’ve heard about your paintings and I think we’ll find a way to get you into our course.’

  I walked on air back to the bus stop.

  ‘Ma, I can go to school again and paint,’ my voice squeaked. I could hardly breathe.

  Ma stitched me clothes to wear for my first day.

  My art teacher, Mr Robinson, talked about perspectives and famous artists, showing us pictures in books. Some had had hard lives and knew hunger just like me.

  I learned different styles of drawing, using colours to define images.

  On my last day of school, I gave Mr Robinson a Christmas present – a painted hub cap showing a starry night sky with a skinny moon.

  Studying my painting, he smiled, ‘I think I’ll title it Night Sky by Australian Picasso.’

  I couldn’t wait to get home. ‘Ma, I’ve got a certificate,’ I yelled as I approached the humpy. ‘Mr Robinson said I was his Picasso.’

  Ma laughed and clapped her hands.

  I knew he’d liked the hub cap. Those round roadside canvasses had changed my life.

  ‘Don’t you go big notin’ yourself, girl,’ Ma warned.

  I didn’t hear her. I was walking on the moon, leaving totem marks in the dust.

  About the author

  Working in the area of child and family support, Tess developed child abuse prevention strategies for government agencies and worked closely with the Indigenous community.

  Tess’s experiences in community advocacy have been a guiding focus for the writing of many children’s books for government and non-government organisations on a range of topics. With book titles such as I Feel Scared When Mum & Dad Fight; When Mum and Dad Talk; My Dad’s in Prison; Touches and Feelings; and the award-winning Everyone’s Got a Bottom, Tess gives voice and acceptance to difficult and complex issues, and brings positivity and fun to sober and sometimes confronting topics. Her books have sold throughout Australia and overseas.

  She describes herself as a writer, educator and performer, and has delivered plays in the UK and Australia addressing social issues. She writes reflective and humorous poetry, was the poet in residence at Brisbane Expo 1988, and has appeared at the Woodford Folk Festival in the ‘Poets Ha Ha’ segment.

  Tess lives in Queensland and has written poems and stories since she was ‘knee-high to a grasshopper’. She has two children, and grandchildren, who keep her up to date with the latest music. One of her goals – still to be realised – is to write a pop song that makes the charts!

  MESSERSCHMITT

  Kim Kelly

  Third Prize

  ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll push you onto the road,’ he said.

  I hadn’t said anything, of course. I’ll never know who he was talking to that morning as we sped along that slim strip of highway, returning home from our anniversary weekend away. I hardly knew him, though we’d been married twelve years.

  Early morning, just before six; the roadside eucalypts were charcoal sketched; the autumn hills were flocked in a fine grey haze, deepening all greens and the golds of the poplars that lined the white drives of once-upon-a-time bluestone home
steads. I was so tired, I thought: if I die here, at least I will have seen something lovely before –

  Bang.

  Is that the sound I would make? Would it hurt?

  I counted over each play and point of the rugby match we’d watched on the motel TV the night before; a field goal late in the second half that thwarted him; the three hours of pacing afterwards; the running out of cigarettes. He hated any thwarting. I waited for him to lean over me to flick open the door, there in the car; I waited for the shove. I imagined my forehead hitting the gravel verge, a rosella splash across the bitumen blur, across the pale sky. A moth smashed on the windscreen and I almost laughed; knew too well not to. Here one moment, and then not. I was so frightened that, after all those years of holding my breath in wonder at what would happen next, I’d forgotten just when I’d ceased to exist.

  I hoped the kids would only ever know it was a tragic accident – the whole thing. Especially me. I hoped death would bring me sleep.

  He stopped at the first service station we saw for petrol and a packet of cigarettes – quick, sharp scratch of the match – and when he got back in the car, he looked me up and down and said, ‘You should lose some weight.’

  And I knew it was over then. He’d returned to himself; pulled away from whatever psychotic conversation he’d been at. I wondered if he’d thought I was too fat, too heavy, to push out of a moving vehicle. Maybe I was. I sat like a sandbag the rest of the way home, two hundred k’s: swollen, straining at my seams, holding in a flood.

  Why didn’t you just leave him? That’s what they always ask, don’t they, those who’ve never weighed two hundred stone.

  You can’t move.

  There is the fear, yes – caught-in-the-headlights paralysis. And there is anticipation of fear – a distant beam sweeping around a winding mountain track in the dead black of night. But it’s the weight that keeps you there: in the car, in the house, in the bed, under his fist, dragging time with it inside some scientific law we’re yet to understand, some measurable relativity between pain and inertia.

  I saw it in the ropes that tied me to the weight. I would stare at them: the sinew-twist threading the hook ends of the pegs, their spearheads driven into rock, two thousand years deep. Each insult, each bruise, each turn of the cheek held me down tighter. Each excuse I made for his behaviour and my own held me down tighter still – the kids, the mortgage, the failure of his art, the failure of his love, the failure of each of his two hundred selves, the burden of every thwarting, the shame it was that his wife paid all the bills. Ropes cutting into my flesh, my fat.

  But any rope, any piece of string, is only ever so long, and, stretched, there comes a breakpoint, a tightening too far that unravels the lot.

  Mine came the evening he said, ‘You’ve left a mess under the coffee table.’

  I was holding a packet of spiral pasta, about to open it into the boiling pot. ‘A mess?’

  ‘Yes.’ He pointed at the coffee table and told me, smiling, ‘You really don’t care, do you.’

  ‘Care?’ I cared about everything. I cared about every detail in high contrast, high resolution, hypervigilant, 3D technicolour. Most of all, at that moment, I cared about getting the pasta on the table in time for us to get out the door for one of the kids’ school concerts. Both my boys watched me as I stepped around the kitchen bench and went over to the coffee table to see what I’d done; they were too young to know what I was doing but old enough to know it was wrong.

  I bent and tilted my head to see: a sprinkle of biscuit crumbs, maybe half a dozen vanilla specks, on the turquoise border of the rug, between the legs of the coffee table; the brushstroke stripes of the walnut grain along those sabre legs the circle edges of eternity.

  And I knew I was over it then. I sat down on the rug, still holding the packet of the pasta, and I told him, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’

  ‘Get up,’ he said. ‘You’re mad.’

  I didn’t get up. I sat there staring at the spirals of plastic wheat in their plastic bag; I crunched them slightly in my hands.

  My elder boy, almost eleven years old, said to his father, ‘Stop being mean to Mum.’

  I heard the words ‘stop’ and ‘Mum’; I heard the voice of a boy becoming a man; I heard the creak and thrash of a rope giving way.

  I stood up, told my sons, ‘Go out to the car. Let’s get hamburgers tonight.’

  He grabbed my arm in the hall. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Leaving,’ I told him.

  I don’t know how I drove the kids anywhere that night. I stared into the bright, blaring lights of the trucks on the wide, black highway, and I told them, I’m all right. I’m all right. And I would be.

  He didn’t come after me. All those years and I hadn’t understood he was a coward; a shadow, unattached; a pointless streak of darkness.

  He took up with another woman soon after, whispering sweet misogynies into her ear. He’s whispering his hatred into her still, right now. I can hear him: You’re just like her.

  Where did it begin, this whispering? Somewhere in the womb, probably.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ve been here, too,’ Mum told me at the security doors of the lock-up psychiatric ward. ‘Your father had a breakdown the month after you were born.’

  As though it was my fault. My fault that Dad’s two hundred screaming anxieties had caused him to collapse at work, collapse at life. Only looking back now can I see Mum sought some camaraderie in my distress.

  ‘But he’s a good man, really.’ She held me there without touching any part of the whole of me that longed for touch. ‘Shush. Don’t upset the baby.’

  I was eight months pregnant with my second boy. My husband had been rounded up by the police the night before shouting into a busy city intersection that a spirit lizard had told him to get to the capital immediately so he could meet with the prime minister – advise him on immigration policy and changing the national flag. He brandished his design at all the angry cars: rolled inside a cardboard cylinder, it depicted an orange kangaroo wreathed within a rainbow snake. He broke my heart two thousand times a second as I called him from the kerb. Shoeless and shirtless and crying at the cars, he couldn’t hear me calling him home above the clamouring of all his selves. He couldn’t draw, either: the kangaroo looked more like a bear.

  A sad and lonely bear. How I ached to hold him, touch him, make it make sense somehow, to him, to me.

  But there at the security doors, I hesitated; a clatter of clipboards falling and falling to this infinity’s linoleum floor, as I remembered how it really began.

  ‘Eat it,’ he’d growled at me, two weeks earlier, brandishing the sandwich he’d made, haphazardly wrapped in cling film.

  ‘No, please. I’m not hungry,’ I’d begged him with every steady gentleness I could find. I begged him with my whole sore, skinless heart to stop. ‘Please.’

  ‘Eat it.’ He shoved me down onto a metal bench seat at the quay, the world around me lunchtime rushing, the ferries on the harbour pushing through and around my confusion. He stood a full foot taller than me in his socks; second-row solid, second-rate actor, his breath stank of desperation.

  I looked down at my belly, my child. ‘Please. No. I have to get back to work.’

  ‘If you love that baby, you will eat it. If you love me, you will eat it.’

  I took a bite. The sandwich was made of stale bread and he’d filled it with cashews that fell here and there on my skirt and the paving stones at my feet. My mouth was so dry, and the sandwich was so dry, I could hardly swallow.

  ‘Finish it, or I’ll tell them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll tell everyone you don’t love your baby and you don’t love me. I’ll go up to your office now and tell everyone how disobedient you are.’

  I ate the sandwich then. I couldn’t risk him going anywhere near my office, not in this state. I worked in a law firm one block back from the quay: a large, prestigious, international law firm. I should
have told the entire building myself, from the roof. I should have told them my husband had just forced me to eat this dry, stale, cashew sandwich. I should have told them my husband was violently insane. But I couldn’t. Who would believe me?

  ‘Everything will be easier if you’d only learn to accept my will,’ he said as I continued to force it down. ‘Finish it.’

  What could anyone say or do to make sense of this anyway? I thought: he’ll only change back into one of his many acceptable selves if I tried. He’d put on his shoes; he’d put on a smile and a nice tie, offer my boss a cigarette. He’d done it every other time.

  He took my hand, down there at the quay. ‘Good girl.’ I thought: he’s got what he came for. He’s all right now.

  He wasn’t.

  He dragged me through the crowd of suits and tour groups, whispering, ‘Don’t look up. There’s a Messerschmitt circling the bridge. Listen, listen – can you hear it coming?’ Shoes and shadows everywhere; a taxi screeching into the rank; the teal water throwing blades of silver sun into my eyes as I looked away to the seaweed brushing the curve of foreshore wall. ‘Luftwaffe. I can see the black cross on the tail. Hurry up – it’s getting closer. They’re going to strafe us. They know you’re a Jew.’

  I wrenched my hand from his and ran. Back inside the cold, quiet granite of my attempts at everyday, I touched the up button for the lift, safe and not safe, tidying my hair across those twenty-eight stories, up and up, my blood still galloping blindly over clouds: help me, please, I’m just an atheist. I’m just –

  Ding.

  ‘Hi there. Stack of messages for you,’ the receptionist sang, barely more than a child herself, nylon nails clicking against the glass-topped desk as she picked up the telephone notes.

  ‘Thanks.’

  I got every message, every single one of them, from the moment we first met and one of my girlfriends said, ‘No. Not him. If you go out with him, I can’t be your friend anymore.’