Hope Shines Read online

I shrugged. I only wanted to see his fine, long limbs and fingers; hear the rasp of his laughter; feel the shapes of his wounds and cure them. Erase his past: his fractured family full of war; his mother’s elegant incompetence; his father’s recent suicide. I would rescue him.

  ‘Idiot.’ He first called me that on our third date, upset that I had overdressed for the theatre. He called me an idiot two thousand times before I finally confessed, somewhere between the threat to push me out of the car door and leaving of my own accord.

  ‘I’m not well.’

  His eyes glistened with what looked like concern. ‘But you’re the strong one.’

  I wasn’t. And I was: herculean. And I wasn’t.

  The bee in my shut bud begged for air, refusing to die, while I pleaded with the earth to stop bending and shivering beneath my feet. I’d sunk almost up to my knees in aspic earth; my life rushed by and by and all I seemed able to do was watch it through the window I’d made in the passenger-side of my terror. My tiredness.

  I said, ‘I’m hurting myself.’

  But he took it the wrong way, and the right way. ‘I’ve never hit you. I never laid a hand.’

  That was true. Across the years, he’d kicked me, yanked my hair, pressed his knuckles to my jaw, rammed himself into every hole I owned. Spat, pinched, bellowed, hissed: ‘Idiot.’ ‘Ugly.’ ‘Fat-arsed.’ ‘Bitch.’ But he’d never actually laid a hand.

  ‘Please stop.’ My whisper sought them all.

  His eyes were wet with – tears? Bewilderment. He insisted, ‘But you love me.’

  I didn’t, not by then.

  ‘I have tapes.’ He fired off the last of his threats. ‘I’ve recorded all the things you said to me – all your disrespect. It won’t look good in court.’

  ‘What?’

  The worst of all my weakness, all my illness, was that for a moment, a very long moment, I believed him.

  I believed he was my responsibility. I believed all his failures were mine. I believed he had the evidence to prove it. Deep in gene memory. Deep in the jelly of my bones.

  ‘Mum?’ my younger boy appeared in the hall. ‘I can’t sleep.’

  I can – these days.

  These twelve years on, I sleep like a mother whose sons have become men and show little sign of him – they show no hatred of anything, not even him. Whether by some miracle of grace or some grace in me, I really don’t care. I’ll give my therapist a good share of the credit; she took one look at me and said, ‘Tell me – tell me everything he did.’ I did. Oh, the relief in all that telling; I have hardly any recollection of it but the cool-warm deluge racing all around me, racing all over my skin. Releasing the ropes that remained; releasing the bird in my chest. She said, ‘I know a decent lawyer.’ I shook my head.

  I knew better lawyers than she did and I didn’t want revenge; I didn’t have the fight, the energy for anything like that. Floating, my lightness strange to me, my strength, on reflection, astonishing, I told her, ‘I just want to be free.’

  Freedom is an illusion, of course – there is no such thing. What I meant was that I wanted to be free of him. Free of every weight that wasn’t mine.

  And I am.

  I am mad – aren’t we all? Yes. Shattered and frantically gathered, kaleidoscopic heaps of pieces. And most of us aren’t made cruel by it.

  But, perhaps, blessed are the cruel, for they teach us to love ourselves.

  Eventually.

  Besides, as truth in all its slipperiness would have it, Messerschmitt went out of business the month after I was born, too. My plane, unmarked, unarmed, glides out from the city and across unfolding fields of possibility. From two thousand metres, I can’t see him at all. I see my roads, two thousand roads, all leading to this flight, streaming to this height, this beautiful levity.

  This beautiful awe.

  This me.

  About the author

  Kim Kelly is the author of seven novels, including the acclaimed Wild Chicory and The Blue Mile. Her stories tell the tales of ordinary Australians living through extraordinary times, leading her readers with lyrical charm into difficult terrain along themes of bigotry, class conflict, disadvantage and violence in our history.

  A widely respected book editor by trade, stories fill her everyday, but it’s love that fuels her intellectual engine. In fact, she takes love so seriously that she once donated a kidney to her husband to prove it, and also to save his life.

  Originally from Sydney, today Kim lives on a small rural property outside a tiny goldrush village in central New South Wales, where the ghosts are mostly friendly and her grown sons regularly come home to graze.

  ‘Messerschmitt’ is a work of fiction.

  Saltwater

  Alice Bishop

  Highly Commended

  I never thought I’d be the last-minute holiday type, or that you’d find me alone – drinking duty-free vanilla vodka on a tiled decking overlooking aquamarine water, ocean the colour of the faux-turquoise jewellery we all used to wear when we were fourteen. I didn’t know about the burns unit blur back then – about septic wounds, fluid resuscitation, sooty septum checks and nasogastric tubes. I didn’t know about respiratory failures, or how burning flesh smells in hospital halls at night. Acetylcysteine – I didn’t know what that was, either.

  There was a time I hadn’t heard about the bushfire roar, the one that one of my patients talked about in her sleep (she also mumbled about the smoke turning things dark, then the heat). I read it would’ve been like an oven door opening, a gush. They say that most animals burned where they stood; that the fire came so quickly that all that was left was blackened statues. Charred. The article also made me think of paddocks of cows, then of the fences that’d held them in.

  I guess when something like a bushfire’s all over the news – worst in history – people like to think they’re making a difference, somehow. ‘Self-care is so important,’ my good friend Mae’d said, handing me a giant card caked in glitter after it all – a return airfare inside, along with thousands of CFP Francs. Friends’ names I’d almost forgotten had signed their distant well wishes: Sarah, Jess, Fatima, Uri and Dean – Dean Dawson (the first person to ever call me their girlfriend). I still wonder if that money should’ve gone somewhere else. I just got to know the fire through the aftermath of it: the smell of burned-up skin and betadine.

  Seat 22B flies me to Nouméa, the French-speaking capital of New Caledonia, just a couple of hours off the gaudy or golden (I can’t decide) Brisbane coast. I guess I like the island straight off, with its palm-lined town squares, tropical flowers and brightly painted front yard fences. I like, also, how the coffee shops don’t have soy. All the people seem happier here. Calmer.

  ‘Bonsoir,’ I say to the hotel receptionist, maybe a little too eagerly, on arrival – but that’s it: the extent of my leftover high school French. Almost too pretty (the kind of pretty that makes you uneasy, you know), she wears a linen dress, yolk-yellow, and a fresh frangipani behind her ear.

  ‘Bonsoir, madame.’ She smiles back – but probably out of pity. I haven’t looked after myself since our ward was the busiest it’s ever been. Look at me: all puffy from vending machine dinners and pale from eleven-hour hospital shifts. Madame. The salutation makes me feel embarrassed. Like I’m seen as a proper adult, a woman (and I have no excuse to be wearing the stretched Cotton On trackies I’m in).

  ‘Just the one set of keys, ma’am?’ The hotel receptionist smiles again, showing those kind of clear braces that aren’t really see-through at all. I imagine her name is Danielle or Lorde or Francessca and that she probably has a house she bought on her own. A partner who ran her baths on the weekend, who loves the way she looks, always – even when she’d just woken up, mascara smudged into the pillow marks across her perfect cheek.

  ‘Oui, just me,’ I shrug and nod. Oui being one of the only other words I’ve held on to, apart from baguette, maybe Brie. I can smell tinned tomatoes, maybe red soup. Then a microwave beeps from somewhere beh
ind the hotel desk.

  ‘Great,’ the receptionist says.

  ‘Yes, just me,’ I repeat – to be sure she understands.

  ‘Very warm,’ the woman replies, and before she shakes her head I – for just a moment – am unsure what she means. ‘Very hot in Australia lately,’ she says. ‘Climate change, fires,’ she adds. ‘Very serious. Very worrying.’

  The microwave from the hotel office beeps again.

  ‘Yes, merci,’ I say.

  ‘Enjoy your stay,’ she says.

  We were told that the radiant heat and smoke – if not shock – had killed most people as the bushfire hit, told that the only cases we got would be either really bad or quite minor. There was never much in-between. The severest cases would die during transport, mostly. But even the ones that made it to the unit could be quite bad. ‘Be prepared,’ we were told, in hushed but stern voices from the Burns Unit Manager and the nurses who’d been there a while.

  Before my holiday leave was approved the other nurses in the unit had been distant; or maybe they were just tired, too. I’d got a shock when I caught my reflection in the daily-cleaned hospital door: my hair was so dirty it looked damp and my dark roots’d all grown out, but not in that fancy Balayage way. Tiredness had got me grittier, my eyes cupped by big shadows and my scrubs almost a size too small, smeared with a muddy mark of make-up at the neck.

  On my breaks I’d eaten too many muesli bars while reading cases about people dying near their soon-to-burn houses: of smoke inhalation, sometimes radiant heat. After the fires whole families had been found – just metres from their open-doored cars. I read about a woman, got by carbon monoxide poisoning near her front yard chair. ‘Local Teacher: Her Peaceful End,’ one small paper obit heading read.

  Peaceful. That deceptive word got used a lot in our unit, especially when talking to families of the dead. I usually made sure there was a distraction between us and the jumpier types – sometimes a clipboard of nothing, sometimes an offering of lukewarm lattes in paper cups. People do unexpected things when grief finds them. It’s good to have a buffer, we were taught.

  Topical antimicrobials, grafts (and skin substitutes), sepsis treatments, mechanical ventilation and renal support – the ward lists of things to monitor went on. But you can’t do enough, really, when severe burns are involved. I’d read up on bad cases, sure, but you can’t really even imagine what happens to flesh in fires strong as two Hiroshima bombs. There are things, I reckon now, you can’t unsee. Things you can’t forget the smell of.

  ‘Guess I got chucked in the deep end, good,’ was all I had said to Mae after it all – over summer iced coffees, milky, soy and just a bit too sweet. As usual, she was wearing one of her expensive blouses printed with little things – galahs, eucalyptus leaves, even tiny sea turtles and purple weed.

  ‘You need a holiday,’ said Mae, reaching over to touch the growing softness of my upper arm. And I loved her then, smiling in that way that isn’t really a smile but an acknowledgement that she wouldn’t ask the usual questions: How many people really died in the bushfire – the number keeps changing, hey? Were they all burned up really bad? What was the smell of burned bodies like – I’ve heard you can never forget?

  The 52 hums along the coast – even the buses are quieter in New Caledonia, seem more at ease. Mangroves push up through the shining water outside. A collarless dog runs alongside us for a while, barking, before we leave her behind. I wonder where she sleeps, who feeds her; she looks healthier than most of the dogs back home. People step onto the bus with the right change, bags of washing powder, baguettes and other ordinary things. Most of the women wear bright cotton dresses, making my strapless polyester dress – gold flecked and foiled – seem tacky and crass.

  ‘Bonsoir,’ the driver says as I get off in the more touristy area – a Hilton hotel looming over perfectly bowed coconut trees and the occasional group of New Caledonians, sitting in circles on the grass that turns into sand which then – a bit further on – is the same aquamarine ocean I saw from the plane. The same colours of the turquoise and jade dolphins – sometimes sea turtles – we wore around our necks when we were thirteen. Growing up in Coburg, Fawkner and Diamond Creek, I dunno how we’d told ourselves we could convince anyone we were anything like the surfer girls we’d idolised in magazines.

  ‘Bonsoir, bonsoir, bonsoir,’ I practice under my breath as I walk towards the sparkling bars up ahead, the nightlife – hoping both wouldn’t be as tacky as my clothes. Cars and kids and bicycles all made their way beside me along the boulevard. Local shop owners in plaited leather sandals, too-tanned women my grandma’s age in fluorescent-peach crop tops, a white man in saggy jeans and a rasta hat. I wonder, then, who would shout out first, who would yell out, if a fifty-foot wave gathered height along the horizon. Would it be me – kicking off my espadrilles and yelling, ‘Run!’ Or would I freeze and just wait to be pulled under? Apart from the initial terror, would there be some kind of peace – a letting go? The type you always hear from people who sell their stories of near-death?

  What would be left for the hospital, after? That’s a question I think about, too. Probably the most. Maybe there’d be a nurse like me, fuelled by vending machine breakfasts and canteen coffee, her packet-dyed hair tied back from her moon-round face. Maybe she’d also only begun to realise all the different ways a body can break. Perhaps she’d be there in the tsunami aftermath, with all the odd shoes – small ones, big ones, new and old, which they’d find, after it all – scattered, like washed up soft drink bottles, along the beach.

  Back in Melbourne, the syrupy swirl of Smith Street’d seemed so wrong during summer nights out, especially that week after the fires were all over the news. My patients had been bed-bound, some choking on their own exhausted bodies – throats finally caving in – as we danced till our polyester dresses dripped and all the souvlaki shops began to fill with sloppy people, shredded lettuce, forgotten five-dollar notes and bits of falafel ball falling to the floor.

  I’d told the girls about the new weight of my job that night, tried to maybe tell them about how bad it all was – about having to stimulate wounds, remove charred tissue, and constantly administer IV fluids. But after about twenty minutes (about the time when I mentioned the enemas), my old hockey friend Kate stood up in her glittering plastic shoes. ‘Toilet,’ she said. ‘And when I come back, gals, let’s talk about my new guy.’ She smiled her faux-shy smile, looking relieved and making sure to look specifically at me – probably not out of nastiness, but fear. But it made sense. I learned pretty quickly that people don’t like talking about my work, or even the fires, unless there’s an unusually gruesome or TV-worthy happy story. The more regular gory stuff – it’s just a reminder of the uncomfortable ordinariness of disaster aftermath, of death.

  ‘Merci,’ I say. The bartender hesitantly pours me a crème de menthe (it just sounded so French-like, you know, so I thought I’d better try). A local woman walks past the bar windows, dressed like she’s been working at a bank – pleated pants and a white shirt (the kind my aunt would refer to as ‘a blouse’). Like the hotel receptionist, she also has a frangipani, fresh, behind her left ear. It makes me think: I haven’t read up on the French colonisation of this place like I should’ve. About the island’s first people, who I think were stolen from their families to work in Queensland’s sugar cane. At that moment I’m embarrassed that I can’t even remember the word for ‘sorry’ in French.

  ‘I’ve actually never served this, you know?’ The woman behind the bar says in a French accent, thick. Frizzy gold hair haloes her perfect round face.

  ‘Oh,’ I reply. I wonder if she’s happy working here, and guess she’s the kind who is really good with her money – saving all her tips to put away for a little place of her own. Maybe she’s looking for a beach bungalow, with wind chimes made from ordinary string and a freestanding bath. She probably has a partner, too – the kind that brings her glasses of water in the middle of the night.

  ‘M
erci.’ I nod as she pours another. ‘Thank you,’ I say then, just to be clear.

  A man sits at the bar a few seats up; a plaited bracelet on his left tanned wrist, he looks like he’s really from here. He watches me while pretending to look at the TV behind my head. Some moments I feel hideous and in other moments I feel above everything. He looks over at me. Right now I feel beautiful (the crème de menthe helps).

  ‘Bonjour,’ he says once the people between us have left and the air smells of seawater, and a little of petrol – maybe of gasoline. ‘Hello,’ he repeats (he has whiter teeth than my friend Elka who got hers bleached). ‘You on ’oliday, or you for work?’ His accent is thick, and words – not really needed anyway – they’re skipped.

  Nurses, in general, are expected to get used to everything: patients falling in love with you because of the morphine; patients yelling at you for cleaning up after them; patients crying over pineapple muffins and telling you they suddenly have dreams about leaving whoever they’d been loving, before they got in. You can’t get upset though; it all comes from a worried place. A vulnerable place, as my first mentor – a trauma nurse, just out of training herself – once said.

  Aerosolised treatments of heparin, acetylcysteine, and terbutaline/steroid combinations – I learned about the benefits of all these things. As patients came in we learned about singed nasal hairs and facial swelling, about the blackened sputum and the very particular look burns patients get. ‘The pain levels are beyond imagination,’ my colleague said, ‘so get ready for patients to ask you help them end everything.’

  When asked to get more stock of saline solution from down the hall, I remember standing in the supplies room under fluorescent light and looking at my hands: covered in pink skin, still working.

  ‘What are you after?’ A voice came over my shoulder, and I said, ‘Saltwater, that’s all . . . saline?’