11/07 – The Lake of Sunken Apricot Jam
I wrote this, literally five minutes ago. Quite happy – it seems my block has lifted.
“I thought we were going straight home,” I protested, squirming in the backseat. There was sand stuck in the fabric of the seat, from a recent trip to the beach. I hadn’t noticed it when I was wet, exhausted and wrapped in a towel, but now it stuck irritatingly to the backs of my thighs. I imagined the sand as tiny glass shards tearing up my English skin.
The reply came to me in typical Dad fashion: “We’re just going to have a look at something.”
Spring suited the area; oak trees spread their branches wide to create roofs over vast boulevards. Little girls in pastel dresses played with plastic tea sets, and little boys with lice-induced crew cuts kicked footballs to each other in their front yards. It was idyllic, like scenes from vintage postcards.
Grandma gazed out at it all like a mournful goldfish. “That’s Doris and Henry’s old house,” she pointed at a quaint weatherboard, framed with yellow roses. A bluestone church hall came into view, and her eyes lit up behind her thick glasses. “I used to sing there, at balls and parties. You’ve inherited my voice, Lauren.”
I squirmed some more; any mention of my voice usually caused Dad to ask for a public demonstration. I glanced towards the front of the car, but Dad was distracted. He had previously been holding his new wife’s hand, but now his hand was snaking down into her lap. Disgust welled up in me like sour bile in my throat, and I prayed that Grandma didn’t notice. How dare he behave so vilely in front of his daughter and his mother?
I tried to distract myself, staring out at the passing landscape. In only a few minutes we had left behind the last vestiges of suburbia for dead-looking grassland. Hills loomed nearby, burnt by the sun and flattened by thousands of years of harsh weather. It occurred to me that I could not quite imagine a time before I existed. These hills were once awe-inspiring mountains; once, my wrinkled grandmother had felt the music flowing from her mouth like pure light. Now she was strapped into the backseat, like the child she was sitting next to.
We had stopped. I hadn’t noticed.
“This is the spot,” Grandma said.
She got out of the car first, squinting against the breeze that tossed her sparse hair. Dad and his new wife followed her, and then I, anxious that she should fall down the steep incline. The wind was harsh at this height; it blew hard against the buttery flowers that smothered this side of the hill. I looked for the horizon, but failed: – you could see so far that the forests and savannah eventually faded to the same blue as the sky.
“This is where I want to be when I’m gone,” Grandma said. “When I die, I want you to cast mine and Poppy’s ashes into the wind here, at this spot.”
“Actually, Gen was talking about planting a memorial tree in the botanical gardens,” Dad began.
“No, here’s the spot,” Grandma said firmly, looking around as if satisfied. She went back to the car, so I followed.
Dad and his woman looked dumbfounded for a second before following and we were on the road again.
We stopped at lots of country cemeteries, for Grandma to “just pop in and say hello to an old friend”. Perhaps if all your friends are already dead, then being dead yourself is not so scary.
We had been driving for hours when being tired gave way to being a brat, so I campaigned for a rest stop.
“Dad, I need a drink. I’ll simply die if I don’t have one…” Sure, the performance was about 5 years too young for me, but I was thirsty!
“Well, we’re about half an hour from Learmonth. We can stop there.” He looked at me in the rear view mirror. “That’s where your grandmother grew up.”
Grandma turned to me, animated. “Yes, I lived there when I was your age.” She laughed self-consciously at the cliché before continuing. “We had a green house, right near the lake. There was an apricot tree in the backyard; my mother used to make jam from all the fruit when it was in season, so practically everybody in the street would have apricot jam all year long.” She looked at me with a hint of uncertainty as to whether she should continue.
A glimmer of girlish mischief came back into her face, so I begged her to continue. I imagined that she was magically aging in reverse, like in movies. Of course, I was too old to believe this would really happen, but not too old to hope that magic might one day reveal itself to me.
“So,” she began again, still a little apprehensive, “one year, my cousin Billy and I plotted to make sure we didn’t have to put up with apricot jam. The night that my mother finished sealing up all the jars, together we gathered them all up and took them down to the dock. Everybody was asleep, yet we managed to smuggle every jar of that horrible stuff out of the house. We stole my father’s boat and rowed to the middle of the lake, the deepest part. And we threw all the jam in the water… every jar!” She drew up her shoulder dramatically, with the smile of a proud child creeping onto her lips. “Of course, in the morning mother was wondering where all of it had gone – how pounds and pounds of jam could just get up and leave during the night. We never told her that it was us.”
Houses were beginning to come into view now, and we came to a stop in front of a tiny post office-cum-milk bar. A man in a blue singlet waved at us from his verandah on a nearby cottage.
“Sometimes people do that in the country,” Dad explained, “For them, seeing an unfamiliar face is a big thing.”
I stumbled into the shop, examining myself in the glass pane in the door. A teenage mess of arms and legs everywhere. I wonder whether Grandma was as gawky and ungainly when she was my age. I paid for my lemonade and wandered back out to the dust street.
“My house was down there,” said Grandma, and started walking, slowly. I followed, along with Dad and the woman, slipping on sunglasses and assuming the guise of ‘bored teenager’. The streets here did not seem to be planned; it was as if they were just random dirt tracks through the grass, kept by the continual footsteps of locals.
At the edge of a gathering of willow trees, a little green house stood like it was waiting for Grandma to come back to it after all this time.
She smiled; a rare sight since the blow of losing her husband.
“Lauren, right behind those willows is the lake I told you about. Go and have a look!” she urged me.
I ran past the house, suddenly jolted out of my apathy. This was the lake of sunken apricot jams; the real, actual lake, with the real, actual apricot jam at the bottom. Somehow, this singular memory of Grandma’s was something that I could imagine vividly. Life existed for other people before I was around, and people had lived what I lived now; she really was a teenage girl once, sneaky and wayward like I could be on occasion.
The willows were dense and dark, even though there could not have been more than ten of them, possibly planted as a windbreak at some point. I fought past their whiplike tendrils to the other side, reeling for a second at the bright light.
The lake was dry. A parched depression in the grey earth, where no grass grew. My heart sunk into my shoes; how long had it been like this? I knew that Dad had not brought Grandma back here since the year I turned one. There were pictures of me playing in the mud along the water’s edge back then. Obviously the drought claimed Lake Learmonth as its victim in the fourteen years that had since passed.
With my head bowed, I headed back for the waiting party to deliver the bad news. I didn’t want my Grandma to remember the lake as yet another grave. Could I lie convincingly? No, not really. I looked back to make sure that there really wasn’t at least part of a lake still there, when I noticed it.
A sparkle from the middle of the wasteland. Not water, but glass. The apricot jam! I started running towards the centre of the lakebed, crunching delicate bones under my sneakers. It always seemed so much harder in my PE class, but that day I soared over the stark mudflat. The wind roared against my ears, and I did not hear Dad calling me. What was I going to do when I got to the middle? I had no idea.
The jars were half embedded in the hard earth. Some were completely smashed, others cracked, grimy with dried-on, decomposed jam. A few were still completely intact, and the jam still inside them, from that day a lifetime ago. I found myself without any sort of digging tool, so I used my fingers to dig and scratch at the earth until they were raw, and eventually I managed to pry one of the jars from the ground.
Clutching the sunken treasure of her childhood, I started back towards Grandma, still waiting on the other side of the trees.
09/04 – Last Autumn
I wrote this story as an assignment in Year 11, when I was 16; the aim was to try to emulate the style Tim Winton uses in his short story collection Minimum of Two. I was incredibly proud of it at the time, but now I realize that it is a bit cliche. I would love to revisit this, rework it and expand upon it one day.
The Gentleman stepped into the train, vulnerable in the harsh fluorescence. Sparse, white hair stuck to his head like the caramel leaf clinging to his trouser leg, hitching a ride. He was all too aware of the grimy stains on the seats and the gum jammed against the wall; mentally he could clean it all up and make it new again, but in the real world he’d just have to deal with it. Junkies strewn accross nearby seats eyed him hungrily, yearning for a past they could remember.
The Gentleman could remember.
A shared past, but now he was alone. He caught a train to the city in the mornings, returning home in the evenings. To their house, alone. The stony path would crunch and the worn “Welcome” mat would be silent as he came back to their immaculate home. Clean and perfect. Untouched. Ready for when Lucy came home.
*******
A ghost of a woman in the bed, still as a dead rock. Wrinkled, delicate paper-skin stretched over her hollowness. The Gentleman worried about it tearing; finding there was only dust and cobwebs left inside the angel. An angel, he thought, fingering the tube running into her neck.
If only.
No.
He couldn’t think that. He gritted his teeth together. Lucy would get better, she would. Good things come to those who wait. If he waited long enough, she’d have to get better. He couldn’t think of anything else good that could happen.
Come home Lucy.
Vital, young nurses strode purposefully up and down the corridor. Sometimes they would come to see the Gentleman, talk to him. Comatose. Stroke. Life Support. Words that were becoming more and more difficult to say. The nurses pitied him dutifully, day after day.
At six o’clock, he would leave. The days are getting longer and colder, not good for my old bones, he’d say. The hospital was always so warm and soapy-smelling; the trip home was undertaken grudgingly. The walk from the hospital to the train station crept through furiously Latin alleyways and boastfully decadent lanes. The Gentleman didn’t like the city and its folk, or understand them. Restaurants and bars poured out into the streets, laughing and yelling. Riotous human noise. Danger lurked in such a crowd and all were either oblivious or beyond caring. The Gentleman hurried.
This night there was an unfamiliar presence on the train. The Gentleman watched her reflection in the streaky window as she chose a seat and glanced cautiously at the junkies. Her rosy coat was shocking in the grey night. Hypnotic. Dangerous. Lucy had a dress that colour. The Gentleman watched her, wanted to ask her why she wore such a joyous coat, why she was catching his train and why she had a secret smile on her solemn face.
*******
“Go on”, the Boy’s friend said, jostling him. “Ask her.”
The Boy blushed furiously, but took a step. And another. Too late, another black suit whisked her away.
Dammit. He stalked outside, kicking stones and shrubs and leaning against a tree. Crisp coldness pressed against his face and the night was clear. The loud music flooded from the church hall and he could just made out the couples dancing merrily insider. He looked away sulkily. I wanted to dance with her.
He picked a mangled excuse for a cigarette out of his pocket, straightened it and lit it with a match. He was nothing but a shadow and an ember now. The orange glow calmed him. Twigs snapped and leaves crunched, and a distant creature stirred in the night.
A hand touched his shoulder.
“Lucy, it’s cold out…”
Her shoulders were bare and white and it made him shiver.
“Come back inside.”
“I want to dance with you.”
They returned to the church hall and danced, and danced, never again taking another partner. Everyone envied the Boy and his rosy Lucy, but they envied no-one.
******* The Gentleman took his umbrella that morning when the rain fell in cold sheets. The train smelt of slow-drying damp people. He was glad, his garden would benefit, it’d be even more beautiful for when his Lucy came home. His ghostly wife lay as still as always, her chest rising and falling rhythmically. During the morning, he simply held her hand in silence, in the afternoon, he told her about the news. He was always hesitant to eat the second half of his sandwich. Lucy could wake up any moment. She’d be hungry for real food, he thought.
“So greedy!” She’d say. “None for me?”
She talked in his head, but into the real world she never spoke. She couldn’t speak, ever. It tore him up everyday and only hope glued him back together.
He caught the train home and the rosy girl was there, with her shiny curls and thick art book, as usual. She never glanced at the Gentleman and all his greyness. Even he could feel it now, a soupy fog around everything that was once fiery and strong. He was old now, he knew that. Going on ninety. Watched the news every night without paying attention. Wouldn’t dare to sleep in Lucy’s side of the bed or use her favourite teacup. Looked forward to seeing the girl in the rosy coat, though she never looked at him.
One day she didn’t come. The train platform was greyer than usually as some suits and things boarded, but not his rosy girl. Something sunk in the Gentleman and every putrid stain and abandoned piece of rubbish taunted him. They seemed so much more conspicuous and numerous now. He glared at them furiously, as if he could transform them, if he concentrated hard enough, from something so dirty into his wonderful rosy girl.
He missed her.
Sadness hung over him. Once home, he ironed his clothes for the next day, heated up some soup and pretended to watch the news. The world was slowing down, moving like a broken merry-go-round. It spun and swayed. He went to bed. The ceiling beckoned and smiled and then all was gone.
*******
No next of kin. It was so sad, the nurses said. He would visit her everyday, just waiting for her to wake up. He must have truly loved her.
Truly.
Time of death. It’s strange that she went just after him. Funeral arrangements? Yeah, it’s like she was holding on just to spare him the pain. Oh well, what are you doing for lunch?
Evening came for those who were left and the girl in the rosy coat stepped into the fluorescence of the train. Her black eyes scanned the carriage hopefully.
Not here.
The secret smile that fascinated the Gentleman faded as she realised. Her hand tightened around the letter that no-one would ever read now.
Everyday afterwards she caught the train. A caramel leaf stuck to her shoe, hitching a ride. The grimy stains on seats invaded her consciousness and made her want to clean it all up.
Start afresh. A clean, perfect existence.
But in the real world, she’d just have to deal with it.
