“Writers live twice. They go along with their regular life, are as fast as anyone in the grocery store, crossing the street, getting dressed for work in the morning. But there’s another part of them that they have been training. The one that lives everything a second time. That sits down and sees their life again and goes over it. Looks at the texture and the details.”  – Natalie Goldberg

Have a read of my short story ‘JM’ first published in Quadrant Magazine. ‘JM’ is part of my collection ‘Stories from Bondi‘ (Ginninderra Press) – the stories centre on women – their joys, doubts, loves and realisations. The foibles of human nature, with all their pathos and humour, …

JM:

I’ve never told anyone.  To think about it makes my hands sweat and nausea rise from my stomach.  It happened the year I turned eighteen on a sunny late afternoon in February, on the top floor of a building in Double Bay.  I was recently engaged to be married and the wedding was booked for the end of June.  We had gone to the photographer’s studio to have our engagement photos taken.  The photographer was a good friend of my future brother-in-law.  I had met him several times before and had thought of him as old, as my parents seemed to be old, but he can’t in those days have been more than fifty.  He was tiny like a jockey, his trademark cravat tied at the neck beneath a tailored shirt.  His accent, foreign but very English.  His shirt covered the numbers branded on his arm – a childhood survivor of the holocaust. 

I remember his navy and white cravat tied at the throat, but have to imagine his small white hands as he poured Vodka into liqueur glasses and the smile he must have worn on his face, encouraging me to watch the development process in the dark room after my fiancée went back to work.

Looking back at that afternoon I see myself as an ignorant half-adolescent, half-woman, shy, dreamy and vulnerable, in a rush to be grown up and living away from my parents.  I longed for marriage to set me free.

I remember the way he held his fingers when he sipped from the Vodka, as if drinking from a delicate china cup.  He had challenged me.  Said, ‘You’re a woman now, aren’t you?’

I have lost touch with that person I used to be at eighteen, with what it felt like to be about to be married to a man who I loved more than he loved me.

It is almost spring.  I am walking through the gulley of a park near where I live, from one end to the other.  Walking is a form of relaxation, in which the legs take over.  They go their own way.  I watch the ground, all the way there and back, take stock of the sounds and smells, and the physical transformations, when I feel my shoulders return to their sockets as I wander along the path by the creek and through the trees.

During the period of our engagement I was being checked out by my future brother-in-law re my suitability to marry his wife’s brother.  It was a reminder that I needed to show I could fit in to a European lifestyle:  home-baked ghugelhoff and bishops bread, veal schnitzel, thinly sliced cucumbers soaked in vinegar and sugar, hot milk for the coffee served in a ceramic jug, Persian rugs on wooden floors.

I had emerged from dumpy adolescence into tiny-waisted, exciting womanhood.  By spending whole afternoons in front of the bedroom mirror and catching my reflection in shop windows, and from the attention of some of the boys at the Saturday night dances, I discovered I had changed, from a large adolescent into a petit woman.  I had brown curly hair like my aunt and my skin burnt and freckled in the sun before turning a honey-gold.

My father had seemed surprised that a mature man with his own successful business and good financial prospects began to visit our house.  “Is he married already?’ he asked, his eyebrows in a scowl above his newspaper.

He was shocked, now that he saw me through a man’s eyes, at how far I had come from the young girl I was, my hair wound into curls like Shirley Temple by my mother’s home-perm kit, wearing frilly dresses he brought back from America from his business trips.  If only my mother had been stricter with me, this older man wanting to marry me would never have happened.  It was all my mother’s fault for letting me grow up too quickly, like letting me buy that strapless dress for the school dance.  ‘You want to attract attention from boys,’ he accused me from across the breakfast table.

The fact is, I had exceeded, almost beyond my own expectations, in making myself look older.  My mother must have wondered at times if I could ever be toned down with my body-hugging dresses, my geometric-cut hair with its dark rinse (wanting to look like Elizabeth Taylor), the black kohl pencil around the eyes, the eyeshadow, the stick-on false eyelashes, the thick foundation applied with a wet sponge.  Not that this helped the outbreaks of pimples.  I was out of their control and the pimples were out of my control.  My mother was proud that I was getting married.  When my father complained, she shook her head and dismissed him.

This is one of the places where I like to go, this park that is a creek valley with trees, shrubs and grasses growing on the sides of the basin and a watercourse where lizards and frogs laze.  Twelve hectares of urban bush land not far from where I live.

I enjoy walking along the winding network of paths, down through the bush vegetation that link a series of gazebos, bridges and staircases.  On the sides of the lower valley, where the tennis courts are, rainforest plants of Blueberry Ash, Lillipilli and Black Wattle reflect the afternoon light.

I stop at a café near the courts, where lilac wisteria drapes the white painted wooden posts of the verandah.  The branches of the wisteria are twisted around its own trunk.  The sound of the punch of a tennis ball between two women on the court.  In the café are cane high-backed chairs around small square tables.  A group of white-clad tennis ladies stands up to leave.  On the table are their water glasses beside screwed-up white paper serviettes and an empty water jug.  When they leave, the glasses, the serviettes and the jug are the only sign that they have visited this place.

I am back in the photographic studio on that summer afternoon.

He unlocked the darkroom, rested his shoulder against the door and motioned me into the room.  It was heavy with the smell of chemicals.  I walked towards the tanks where the film lay and then moved around the edge of the baths.  I was surrounded by darkness.

‘Ah,’ he said, sighing.  ‘This is where it all happens.’

The room was appearing through the dark as my eyes became accustomed to the shadows.  The black-clad windows, hanging trapped in the dark, kept out the outside streets, where people were doing their shopping or drinking short blacks at the sidewalk cafes or driving around looking for somewhere to park in the congested streets.

He pointed to one of the tanks and I moved over to look.  ‘There,’ he said, ‘that’s the film in developing agent.’

He handed me my glass and moved around beside me.  ‘What you can see is the first step of processing – can you see?’

I looked.  It was remarkable.  Later it was the pre-soaking, the dilution of the developer, submerging of the film, the timer, the push-cap on the tank, the ringing of the timer.  The magic of developing photographs.

‘I still feel euphoric when working in the darkroom,’ he said.

Why didn’t I say something?  His body rubbing against mine, his hands, his lips.  What are you doing?

I watched.  It was miraculous.  The pre-soaking, the dilution of the developer, the submerging of the film, the click of the push-cap on the tank … and, then, the ringing of the timer.  The stop bath, the Fixer, the film exposed to light, the wetting agent, submerging the reel.  ‘You hang it up for drying for four to eight hours so it has enough time to dry and harden,’ he said.

I wasn’t used to alcohol, especially spirits.  It immobilized me.  My back pushed against a tank.  I was overwhelmed, felt no power to control the moves.  But I must have known what was going on.

He came very quickly.

My eyes were blurred with tears as I searched for my handbag in the reception area.  I did not turn and face him, did not say anything, agreeing in my youthful ignorance, in a silence that was as good as a handshake, to carry the weight of this secret.  With my high heels clicking on the concrete I walked unsteadily down the narrow passageway of the stairs that led out to the street and out into the daylight of the life that lay ahead.

The sound of water flowing over rocks in the creek hides lizards and tadpoles in the park.  Smooth-barked Apple, Eucalyptus and Tick Bush on the sandy slopes.  A blue-tongue lizard backs away as I pass, his chubby-splayed feet clutching at the path.  Another lizard darts to safety, his body curling and curving into escape.

A small cement truck grinds down the cobbled pathway by the tennis courts.  It tips cement into the mould for a wheelchair access ramp to the cafe.  So many men to make a simple ramp – one carrying a wooden plank, one tapping at the wooden structure, two others in fluorescent vests who watch, instruct and chat.  Their hair is spiked and hatless in the sun.  Dark glasses wrap their browned faces.

‘I married you because you were suitable,’ my husband said.  ‘I wasn’t wearing rose-coloured glasses.’

It all comes back.

All these years later, it is difficult to see the point in being back there, to be that ignorant, vulnerable eighteen-year-old girl I used to be.

The orange revolving light on top of the small concrete truck flashes.  I look around at the tiny buds of spring that are framed by sticky spider webs.  The webs don’t loosen their grip in the breeze.

The frangipani tree is devoid of foliage or flowers.  But spring is on its way.  The afternoon light on the tips of the green leaves on the terraced sides and layered rock shelves, barely move in the soft breeze.

Is this the end of one thing and the beginning of another?   Will all that is familiar  change into something else?  Walking home I have no sense that anything has happened, that a shift may have taken place. Was it something in myself that has been waiting for so long and was finally brought to consciousness, that triggered something in me?  Is it seeing the park poised to burst into spring, or watching the transformation of cement into a bridge connecting the cobbled path to the wooden verandah that make me realize that nothing is final or beyond change?

Copyright © 2023 Libby Sommer

Have a read of my short story ‘Painstaking Progress’, first published in Quadrant Magazine. It’s one of the stories in my collection ‘The Usual Story‘ (Ginninderra Press).

Painstaking Progress:

One can never change the past, only the hold it has on you.  And while nothing in your life is reversible, you can reverse it nevertheless – Merle Shain.

1.

I’m imagining a cloudy autumn morning.  There’s a room.  Half office, half bedroom.  Not too large and not too small.  The windows of the room face east and look out towards the ocean across the expanse of a green gully.

I picture a woman sitting on a bed with pillows behind her back.  The windows are open.  Perhaps it is Saturday morning.  On the bedside table is a mug of tea and a photograph of the woman’s daughter on her wedding day.

The wind begins to stir the big trees outside and the morning haze is beginning to move and for a short moment the sun lightens the carpet and heavy dark wood furniture.  The shadows of the curtains’ curves darken the floor, almost invisible to the woman on the bed.   The morning sun lightens the CD player, the alarm clock, the piles of books stacked on the revolving Victorian bookcase.

She looks out at the water and at the triangle of beach.  Sometimes it seems that nothing much changes out there, although on some days the waves break close to shore and at other times further out to sea.  She can see it all from the bed, even at night time.  The bed faces the beach and the ocean, and so does the desk.  The room is like standing at the rail of a ship.

On the radio:  ‘Waves, to me, are a reason to live,’ says the surfer.  ‘When you see the roar, the jaws, there is nothing that touches it on the face of the earth.’

In June the twilight begins in the afternoon.  The days close in on me, here in this room.  The infinite possibilities in the sky and the sea and the possibility of nothing.

What is this writing life?  It tears me to pieces every day.

2.

Still no rain.

During a cool night, the drought continuing, my night mare is that I am stuck in a narrow laneway unable to turn back.  I get out of the car to attempt to turn it with my bare hands.  But when I turn around to pick the car up, it has disappeared.  I took my eyes off it for one second and it disappeared.  Gone in that second that I lost sight of it.  The desperation descends on me.

I snap on the bedside light just before the dawn.  Dawn through the gorge.  Leaves slight in a breeze, the dark green of the Date Palms.  This shy light is flashing a start to the day.  In fifteen minutes the gorge will come alight in all its subtleties, water flowing across rocks, white butterflies.

Two paragraphs – and half the morning gone.

The driest May in over seventy years.

3.

She’d been relieved when he left the room, so probably it’s already ending.  But she isn’t sure.  She pays close attention to the surroundings, to the people in tracksuits trudging through the sand on the beach, the noise of the traffic up the hill, the static that immerses the room.  He glances at her.  At first he looks at her as though he expects her to speak, but she doesn’t.  So he says, Don’t worry, we’ll get through it.  Then is silent.  She doesn’t answer.  She could reassure him, could say, Yes, that’s right, it’s a small thing, we’ll get through it.  She says nothing.

He’d said he hates being lonely.  She said she’s lonely, horribly lonely.  He said:  It’s a horrible thing loneliness.

4.

Every day my father experienced a deep melancholy about living.  Sometimes it lasted, sometimes it would vanish with the night.  I had a father so desperate with sadness that sometimes even life’s surprises, those very special moments, couldn’t make him forget it.  It happened every day.  It would come on very suddenly.  At a given moment every day the melancholy would make its appearance.  And after that would follow the struggle to go on, to sleep, to do anything, or sometimes the anger, just the anger, and then the despair.

5.

In the dream I was sleeping in a motel.  I saw Father, like a floppy puppet with a wooden head, sitting on the far side of a room.  He had strings attached to his hollow body and was unable to speak.  The intensity of my grief woke me.  I sat up on the big bed and I was by a lake, the sounds of a party under the window.  Headlights bounced off the bridge and into the room through the thick curtains of the motel room.  A small fridge clicked in the corner.  I had been crying and the bones in my chest and in my cheeks were collapsed.  I kicked the sheet off, curled around a pillow and stayed like that for the rest of the night.  I became aware again of the powerful wind over on the beach and the waves curling and breaking and disappearing into the cold sand all the way along the Central Coast.

6.

Today the sea is twice the depth of blue as the blue of the sky.  The clouds change shape as I watch, drifting south, melting and thinning.  At the end of the day their edges will be circled with pink.

When Tom came to visit the first time I was pleased he arrived in time to see the brief pink light on the gully.   From the balcony where we ate we looked out over the round bowl of the gorge, ringed with blocks of apartments and filled with cypress and palm trees.  Branches like whips; leaves every shade of green you can imagine.  Rosellas and cockatoos.  We heard the flock of kookaburras at dawn.

7.

Then there’s the click of the front door.  He walks in.  His hair is tumbled, his lips stained with sunburn; she tells him he looks like he’s had a good time down at the beach and what a good arrangement it is turning out to be.  He has something to tell her.  Would she like a cup of tea first?  He is going in to the kitchen to make one for himself.

No, no thanks.  She’s had one already.  But help yourself and then tell me what happened.  He opens the door out on to the balcony, hangs his wetsuit on the railing.  She watches him.  Little by little he reemerges, becomes agreeable to her again.

Wait till you hear this, he says.  Wait till you hear this story!

His eyes are large and open, nothing hidden.  His hair curly and untamed.  His white cotton tee shirt sticks to him, his thongs flecked with sand.  His hands large and firm, although his voice is unsure, with a note of expectancy.

8.

In late March I’d asked my aunt at the Montefoire Home for memories of Father.  ‘Your father!’ she’d said.   ‘I can’t tell you that.  But I can tell you about your grandparents.  What I know.  You ask the questions and I’ll try and give the answers.’

We were sitting at a round table in the cafeteria eating smoked salmon sandwiches and drinking tea when she said something that shocked me.  She’d looked into her empty cup and then looked up at me.  I’d started to stand up, but she’d motioned me down.  She wasn’t finished.  This aunt, almost bent double with the hump on her back who moved with the aid of a walking frame.

‘I felt very sorry for your mother,’ she said.  ‘I think your mother’s life really improved after your father died.’

9.

‘So what did you write this morning?’  Tom says.

‘Nothing.  Nothing at all.’

He puts the mug onto a coaster and sits at the foot of the bed and looks at her.                  ‘Well, I’ve got something for you.  Wait till you hear this.’  He takes a sip from his drink.  She gets up and turns the radio off, then gets back into the bed.

‘It’s an amazing story.’  he says.  ‘It could be an idea for you, you know, something you might use,’ he laughs and moistens his lips.  ‘The first thing was, I got up when it was light enough, at first light, and thought, I wonder what the swells doing.  I’ll walk down to Tamarama and have a look.  It was up enough so I thought, I won’t walk over to Bronte to check the swell out there, I’ll walk back up the stairs, get into my wetsuit and risk it, just go in, because I wanted to go in.’

She makes an approving noise and nods encouragement.

‘So I came back and got into my wetsuit and walked all the way back down and headed over to Bronte,’ he continues.  ‘Sorry – I forgot a part there – there’s a bit of a side story.  As I was going back up the stairs there was a bloke, surfer fella, went down with a blue Aloha surf board.  Now remember that bit, Sof.  Oh yeah, I thought.  I wonder where he’s going.  So I got into my wetsuit and locked the car and off I went down to Bronte.  As I was walking along with my surfboard and this bloke with a goatee drove past and gave me a bit of a look.  He looked at me and I looked at him wondering, What’s he looking at?’

Tom picks up his mug and looks at her.

‘Remember that, Sofia,’ he says.  ‘That bloke.  That’s two fellas I’ve seen this morning.’

He laughs at what he can see is her impatience.

‘Getting closer, Sof.  I’m getting closer.  Then I ran.  I was really stoked. Good waves, the swell was pretty good.  It was much better this morning than it looked last night.      So I ran down to the southern end of the beach because there’s a bit of a channel there near the rocks and you can have a go.  A bit easier to get in.  And I was sitting there on the sand.  I was pretty tired.  I’d run up those stairs and back down to the beach.  So I’m doing a few stretches and then a lady came up.  Starts talking to me.  Said, Oh yeah the waves look all right this morning and said, Oh yeah, and Okay, and then, Have a good day.  She’d had a bit of a chat and then she’d walked off.    So then I was just about to walk in.  No. No.  Hang on.  I was standing up doing some stretches and I looked out and the bloke was out there by himself.  The one with the blue board.

‘He’d come in.  And then he’s yelling out to me.  Hey!  Hey!  Mate, mate!  And so I thought, What’s going on here?  What’s going on?  He was the only one out there and I was going to be the second one.  So I go over and that’s when this other bloke that I’d seen in the car appears on the beach.  He was standing there too about to go in.’

10.

‘It’s incest,’ a friend said, stirring sugar into her latte as the day closed down.  ‘Except he’s not related to you.’

11.

‘So this guy with the blue board came over,’ continues Tom, ‘and says, Mate there’s a big shark out there and look at the size of the bite mark on my board.

‘A bite mark on the board.  I’d say it was that big,’ he says with wide hands.  ‘The shark bit the whole nose off his board.  He said he’d pushed the board into the shark.

‘The other bloke who’d looked at me in his car said, What will we do?  I don’t think we’ll go in here, I said.  And then one of the clubby guys came down and said, Oh – because all three of us were standing there looking at this guy show us his board.  I said to him, Could you get the rubber ducky out and scare the shark off for us?

‘He said, Oh no.  I can’t do that.  And I wouldn’t recommend you go out there.  And then he said, Well, enter at your own risk.

‘So then, Justin, the bloke in the car with the goatee said, Come on.  Let’s go in.  We’re umming and arring.  He said, I might go in close and I said, I don’t think so.  Because it’s pretty deep in close.  So then, this bloke took off, the bloke with the blue board and showed everyone on the beach.

‘So is that a good story for you darling?  Did I tell it well?  Did I?’

‘Yes, Tom.’

‘You sent me out as shark bait!’

Sofia smiles and leans back on the pillows and pulls the sheet up under her chin.

12.

She’d said:  I want you to stop spending money on me.  Stop buying me things.  I don’t like it.  He looked at her in surprise, asked, If that’s what you want, I won’t do it.  I listen to what you tell me.  Is that what you want?  She said it was.  He started to suffer here in this room, for the first time.  He said he’d go home now if that’s what she wanted.  She’d let him say it.

13.

It’s on a family holiday at the beach.  We’re together, him and us, his children.  I’m five years old.  My father is in the middle of the picture.  I recognize the big grin on his face, the way he’s smiling, the way he waits for the moment to be over.  His fixed grin, a certain tidiness to his dress, by his impenetrable expression.  I can tell it’s hot, that he’s weary, that he’s anxious.

14.

It’s sunrise over the water through the palm trees.  The empty beach.  Living by the sea, watching and waiting.  Trying to find a way to connect the pieces.

15.

She met Tom at a party she’d gone to alone, and then he danced with her, held her closer, asked where she lived.  She didn’t often go to parties.

She wishes she could remember what they did that first day.  She remembers sending him down the steps to look at the swell when he first woke up.  ‘Have you got a pair of thongs I can wear,’ he said.  They laughed when she showed him hers that would barely cover half his foot.

16.

You settle into a comforting routine.  Just the two of you.  Get up early and look out at the swell.  You show your granddaughter, four year old May Ling, his photo.

‘I’m not saying I don’t like him,’ she says.  ‘But I don’t like his hair.’

‘What’s wrong with his hair?’

‘It’s curly,’ she frowns.

‘But I thought you liked curly hair.  You told me I’m lucky because I’ve got curly hair.’

‘But not curly hair on a boy!’

17.

The tables are occupied outside Café Q at Bronte, the blue and white awning is down.  There is a spare seat on the lounge just inside the front door and I cross to it.  The  parking policewoman is kept busy checking the parking meters and writing tickets.  The other regulars are here, the ones who come at this time of the day.  The woman with the baby.  And there’s the little white dog she ties up to the post box outside.  It’s like sitting in a giant lounge room at this place.   The waitress takes the baby outside to play with the buttons of the public phone.  People get up from their seats and stand on the pavement watching for the white sprouts of water.  Whales out to sea today.

Meanwhile the sky has turned into a light translucent grey above the pink glow of the setting sun.  The sea darker out towards the east.  Four spiked- headed palm trees, their trunks encircled in knots.

In the school holidays, I took May Ling to my niece’s house to play with her two children.  Over a cup of tea I asked my niece for memories of her grandfather, my father.  I told her I’d spoken to the aunt in the Monteforie Home and that I wanted to find these things out before everyone died.

‘A lot of them are dead already,’ she said.  ‘I only know they were Russian.’

‘Russia and Poland.  Your great grandmother was Polish.  She was Ben Gurion’s cousin, first cousin.’

‘That’s really something!’

She told me she remembered him being sick most of the time.  ‘Once I got to an age that I could remember things.  I remember him as being sick, but he was quite a large presence really and I remember him in the big chair and he’d have trouble getting up and I’d often help pull him up.  I really don’t have memories of him though.  I remember the night he died and his funeral.  It was at night.  I was in bed and got up and realized that Mum and Dad were in the “grown up” lounge room and Dad went to the hospital and they’d actually said “that was it” because he’d been in hospital for awhile and I went back to my room and closed the door.  I had photos of all my school friends on the back of the door and they all fell off.  It was the spookiest thing.  I didn’t slam the door or anything.  I remember the sound of the photos fluttering to the floor.’

18.

The clouds stretch across the sky and move south.

Tom rubbed her shoulder a little.  It doesn’t really matter so much, does it, darling?  Sometimes he massaged her feet and she would keep on reading.  This time she pulled her feet out of his hands.  He looked out at the dark blue afternoon sweltering on the sea, and sighed heavily and said he felt dreadful for upsetting her.

19.

You have Sunday breakfasts.  At the table next to you three young men talk about Rugby while eating poached eggs on toast.  This cove at Clovelly that is protected from the ocean swells by the rocks.  Iridescent green underside of flippers,  bare-chested swimmers.  Pigeons watch from the cement.  Snorkellers looking for sightings of blue gropers and cuttlefish among the wildlife in this eastern beach.  The occasional Port Jackson shark.

A plane flies through the low hanging cloud over the cliffs.  A woman by the rocks on a stone bench pats the shoulder of the man beside her in a friendly loving manner.  The man’s head, with its peaked white hat, scans the horizon.

The waves brush and break over the rocks that almost enclose the cove.  Boys in flippers, snorkels and short wetsuits with heads down looking for the family of gropers.  Another man ducks his head down into the sea, fills his goggles with water, then empties them.  With head down he floats towards the steps.

20.

‘There’s no need to be self-conscious,’ Tom had said in the early morning light.  ‘There’s no need to be.  It’s the person inside that’s important.’

21.

Through the open door the same cool wind is breaking up the sea into chunks of moving white caps over there towards the horizon.  Beside an upright and steady television aerial, down there near the beach, a palm tree sways in the breeze.

You find a photograph of your daughter when she was thirty.  She’s on the balcony with her own daughter.  She’s wearing a pale pink t-shirt and pearl earrings and her skin looks smooth and brown.  Her smile is happy and bright.  That’s not how she sees herself though, that attitude of someone happy in the moment.

22.

He asks you questions about your family.

‘What about your father?’ he says.  ‘What did he do?  What was he like?’

‘My father was not an educated man,’ you say.  ‘Although he was well read.  He was the eldest in a working class family and he left school at the age of 8.  He was a self-made businessman.’

23.

‘I remember him as being very pale,’ she continued before deciding we needed more tea.  ‘Very white hands.  The translucent nails.  Can’t say I knew much about his personality.  Only his physicality.  It’s very sad.  Awful.’

24.

Tom has strong muscled legs and large biceps.  His arms grip so hard you have trouble releasing them and you can feel how tired they must get from all the paddling.  In his new thongs he looks brown and taut.  He is very proud of his ability in the water and is ready for any emergency between the waves.  Several times a week he practices his maneuvers, conditions permitting.

‘You have fun with me don’t you?’ he says.

‘Yes.’

‘We’ll get through it.  Don’t worry.  Everything will be okay.’

25.

When your brother rings to see how you are, you say, ‘I had a good weekend with Tom.’

‘You mean your little surfie handbag!’ he exclaims.

‘Make sure he doesn’t get your money,’ your sister had warned.

‘What’s his name again?’ your eldest son said.  ‘I keep forgetting his name.’

‘What do you expect me to say?’ said your daughter.  ‘What do you want me

to say?’

26.

On the radio:  ‘It’s really a beautiful day.  I think God’s out there having a swim.’

‘What did your parents say?’ you ask Tom.

‘Dad said, Go for it son.  Mum said, Toy boy.’

27.

‘We used to go to visit every weekend,’ she said.  ‘On, I think, a Sunday afternoon.  We’d go and visit them and he had his bedroom and he had an organ in there.  And he turned the organ on for us while the grownups chatted.  And I remember his bed, his space, the smells of his room.  Not a nasty smell.  You know, there was the smell of the books.  It wasn’t a weak smell.  It was quite hard really.  A sharp smell.  A sharpish smell.  Not a horrible smell.  Not a bad smell.  I remember his pill box next to the bed.  It’s the first time I’d seen one of those pill boxes that had the times of the day on it.  And his little boxy room.  And Nana had the gorgeous gilt bedroom you know, and this huge bed and it was like Arcadia to a little girl.  And then he had a single bed.  I couldn’t imagine such a large man in that bed.’

28.

‘Papa’s room.’  She stumbled on the word, the name she used to call him, barely able to remember.  ‘I can’t remember us playing in Nana’s room,’ she added.

29.

Last night at the Sushi Train at Bondi Junction a friend said, ‘I chatted to a man while waiting in the queue at MBF this morning.  An older German man.  He was so interesting.  I found his stories of Germany fascinating.  There are stories everywhere,’ she added with a rising inflection in her voice and an arching of her eyebrows.

But how to tell them?

She mixed soy sauce into the wasabi paste.  ‘So you don’t think you could love someone your own age?’

‘Love someone at any age.’

‘You don’t love him?’

‘The other day he said to me, You’re well-educated and intelligent.  Sometimes I wonder what you see in me.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said what he wanted to hear.  I said, You’re so handsome and such a good lover.  I didn’t talk about my ambivalence.’

30.

And the funeral? I said, reminding her that I was in South America when he died.

‘Such a big step in the recovery process is the funeral,’ she consoled me.  ‘We lived in Bulkara Road and that steep driveway and there were stairs and everyone used to just go up and down the driveway instead of using the stairs.  Nana was standing at the bottom of the stairs saying, “I can’t go.  I can’t go.  I’m not going.”  Of course she went,’ she added softly.

‘And I wore …… odd shoes!  Which I didn’t discover until later.  Mum decided we were too young to go to the Crematorium so we went to the funeral – which I have no memory of now – I can’t remember where it was – funny.  I remember going in the car and then Mum sent us home with a friend of hers.  When we got to the friend’s house she gave us lunch and I realized my shoes didn’t match.  My sister and I had two similar pairs of white shoes with little heels on them and I’d grabbed one of her shoes.’

‘I heard he died trying to pull all the tubes out.’

‘I didn’t know he had an operation.  The children weren’t told.  I remember the hospital, going there, walking through the courtyard.  I don’t remember being in a room with him.  Sick!  Isn’t that funny?’

‘He asked me if he’d been a good father and did he marry the wrong woman?’

‘That’s why I think that I remember Nana saying, I don’t want to go to the funeral, it’s too upsetting.  I always thought they were at war.  I remember thinking, but he didn’t like you.’  She paused and looked at me, put her hand on mine.  ‘Life’s not that simple though.’

31.

Is there anything else you can remember?

‘I remember him being proud that I was smart.’ she said laughing at herself.  ‘I remember it being a big thing for him.  Which is sort of an old European thing.’

32.

Tom’s skin is amazingly soft.  A thin body, but strong in muscle tone.  He’s almost hairless.  Perhaps he’s weak, possibly too malleable, definitely vulnerable.  She looks him in the face.  Looks into his eyes.  He touches her.  Touches the softest parts of her, caresses her.

He is reticent to mix with the people she knows.  He is just a boat builder, after all, and they may not take him seriously.  Also, they might laugh at the way he speaks.  They might laugh because this is the eastern suburbs of Sydney.

He does not consider himself to be intelligent, witty or articulate.

33.

Sofia breathes in the salt air and remembers the taste of warm salt water on his skin.  She pauses to watch as another wave rears up from the deep.  A lone surfer out on the point.  As she walks the surfer drops down the face of a big left-hander.  He paddles into the path of the wave.  Another wave and he’s kicking hard to mount it, rises to his feet before leaning into his first turn.

‘An around the house cutback is when you go out on to the face of the wave away from the pocket and turn back in to the whitewash and then rebound off the whitewash and back around,’ Tom said.  ‘You’re really doing a cutback into a backhand re-entry off the foam.  Two maneuvers in one.  It’s a good point scoring maneuver, the one I use the most.’

34.

‘Ask May Ling if she wants to come down for milk and cookies,’ my niece called out to her son.

‘And I have a memory of him at the Shabbas table and us crowding around him,’ she said.  ‘But I think that memory comes from a photo, not from the real thing.  How old was I when he died?  He was very sick at my Batmitzvah.  I would have been thirteen.  He came out of hospital for my Batmitzvah and he came up to the Bima and I said, Can I put my arms around you?  And I caught that he was wearing some sort of support thing under his shirt.  I don’t know what it was and then I started to cry uncontrollably and everyone thought I was crying because it was my Batmitzvah, but I was crying because I felt that Papa was “not right”.  And then he went back to the hospital and he didn’t come to the party.  He’d made a huge effort to come to the Shule. You don’t remember, you don’t think about things at that age.  I’d forgotten that memory and it came up.  I remember thinking he was in a lot of pain and he struggled to be there.’

35.

‘What do you do when you’re not working?’ Sofia asked Tom.  ‘You’ve asked me that before,’ he’d said. ‘Not a great deal.’

36.

‘I remember going to Nana’s house and the photos of her from before and I thought she looked just so glamorous.  And going to Dad’s factory and he was working with Papa and they had a wall of stuff they’d brought back from other countries – he’d gone to Japan and brought things back and thinking he was Superman.  Flying to other countries.  But of course I’ve inherited Dad’s view of the world so I know that Dad, ‘the genius’, went into the family business and worked for his father for years and never really wanted to.  Life was not what Dad wanted it to be – or was unable to accept what his life was – put it that way.  I remember now, at the Minion at Nana’s house, Dad ….. I think he’d probably been drinking …. he was very emotional.  He said if he hadn’t sold the business that his father would never had died and that he had all these regrets and on the one hand he wished he’d never been in the business and then on the other hand he wished he’d held on to the business.  I think a doctor told Dad that Papa had nothing to live for because the business had gone.’

‘I heard him say that in hospital.  I said to him there are so many things you can do now.’

My niece laughed bitterly, then said wistfully, ‘Yeah.  All those grandchildren.  I’m so proud of my children.  Lovely family.  That’s what’s important.’

37.

‘Look at that,’ says the waiter looking out at the sea.  ‘It’s coming from the east.  You can never pick it this time of the year can you?’

He taps me on the arms, ‘Are you parked down the road?’

‘No.  I’m on foot.’

I blow on the surface of the coffee, but it is still too hot.

38.

A former heroine addict is being interviewed on the radio:  ‘I was solemn, angry and unhappy,’ he says.  ‘Determined to destroy myself.  The heroin alleviated doubt, unease, discomfort.’

‘What was it like afterwards?’ asks the interviewer.

‘You feel very empty afterwards.  I bottomed out.  You have to decide, Do you want to live or do you want to die?  It was a deep character flaw with me.’

On the radio:  ‘Dangerous surf conditions with the time at five past nine.’

Copyright © 2023 Libby Sommer

Every once in a while, when I’m scratching around for something new to write, I make a list of the things I feel passionate about. The list changes over time, but there are always new ideas to fill the gap.

It’s true that writers write about what they think about most of the time.  Things they can’t let go: things that plague them; stories they carry around in their heads waiting to be heard.

Sometimes I used to ask my creative writing groups to make a list of the topics they obsess about so they can see what occupies their thoughts during their waking hours.  After you write them down, you can use them for spontaneous writing before crafting them into stories.  They have much power.  This is where the juice is for writing.  They are probably driving your life, whether you realise it or not, so you may as well use them rather than waste your energy trying to push them away.  And you can come back to them repeatedly.

One of the things I’m always obsessing about is relationships:  relationships in families, relationships with friends, relationships with lovers.  That’s what I tend to write about when I’m creating stories.  I think to myself, Why not?  Rather than repress my obsessions, explore them, go with the flow.  And life is always changing, so new material keeps presenting  itself.

We are driven by our passions.  Am I the only one who thinks this?  For me these compulsions contain the life force energy.  We can exploit that energy.  The same with writing itself.  I’m always thinking and worrying about my writing, even when I’m on holidays.  I’m driven.

But not all compulsions are a bad thing.  Get involved with your passions, read about them, talk to other people about them and then they will naturally become ‘grist for the mill’.

What about you? Do you find yourself telling the same stories over and over again, but from a different perspective?

Have a read of my short story ‘May-Ling’ first published in Quadrant magazine. I hope you enjoy it.

May-Ling:

May-Ling calls out to me as I get out of the car.  She is fourteen months old and her sweet voice bounces out through the screen door where she is standing and out on to the street in North Ryde where her Chinese grandparents live.  I climb over the small white iron gate that leads to the front door.  Every week she waits for my arrival after Playschool has finished on television.  May-Ling has soft chubby legs and tiny artistic fingers.  Her hands are so well co-ordinated that now she is able to grasp a spoon and feed herself.  She has almond shaped brown eyes and very white teeth that you get to see very often because she laughs so much.   In her pink and white gingham floppy hat that she wears to the park, she looks even cuter.  What a cutie, say people on the street when I take her out for a walk in the stroller.  What a cutie.

I am the apprentice grandmother.  The Chinese grandmother shows me what to do.  She might correct my nappy changing skills, show me that I have done the nappy up too tight, that I need to be able to slip my hand in between the nappy and May-Ling’s fat tummy.  Or she might show me how I need to rock May-Ling back and forth and pat her gently on the bottom so she’ll fall asleep in my arms before putting her into the cot.

Continue reading →

Have a read of my short story, Art and the Mermaid, first published in Quadrant Magazine. The story about the famous Bondi Beach mermaid sculptures at Ben Buckler is the opening tail in my collection Stories From Bondi published by Ginninderra Press (2019).

I hope you enjoy it.

Art and the Mermaid:

Once upon a time it came to pass, so it is said, that an enormous storm swept the coast of New South Wales, doing extensive damage to the ocean beaches – destroying jetties, breakwaters and washing away retaining walls.  Mountainous seas swept Bondi Beach and dashed against the cliffs carrying ruin with every roller.  At North Bondi near Ben Buckler a huge submerged block of sandstone weighing 233 tons was lifted ten feet and driven 160 feet to the edge of the cliff where it remains to this day.

One day a Sydney sculptor, Lyall Randolph, looked upon the rock and was inspired.  The sculptor was a dreamer.  Let us, he said, have two beautiful mermaids to grace the boulder.  Using two Bondi women as models he cast the two mermaids in fibreglass and painted them in gold.

Without Council approval and at his own expense he erected The Mermaids for all to see on the giant rock that had been washed up by the sea.  The Mermaids sat side by side on the rock.  One shaded her eyes as she scanned the ocean and the other leant back in a relaxed fashion with an uplifted arm sweeping her hair up at the back of her neck.  Their fishy tails complemented the curves and crevices of their bodies.

It so happened that less than a month after The Mermaids were put in place, one was stolen and damaged.  The Council held many meetings to decide if she should be replaced using ratepayers’ money.  The council had previously objected to the sculptor placing the statues there without Council permission.  The sculptor had argued that before placing The Mermaids in position he had taken all necessary steps to obtain the requisite permission.

The large boulder at Ben Buckler, upon which The Mermaids were securely bolted and concreted, he said, is not in the municipality of Waverley at all.  It is in the sea.  According to the Australian Constitution high-tide mark is the defined limit of the Waverley Council’s domain.  The Maritime Services Board and the Lands Department both advised me they had no objection to the erection of The Mermaids.

One Waverley Alderman said he wished both mermaids had been taken instead of only one.  Someone else said the sculptor didn’t need the Council’s permission to put them there in the first place and the The Mermaids had given Bondi a great attraction without any cost to the Council.  The sculptor said The Mermaids had brought great publicity to the Council.  They had been featured in films, newspapers, television and the National Geographic magazine.

The Mayor used his casting vote in favour of the mermaid and she was re-installed.

For over ten years the two beautiful golden mermaids reclined at Ben Buckler, attracting many thousands of sightseers to the beach.

Poised on the huge boulder they braved the driving storms of winter until one day one was washed off.  The Council saw its opportunity and removed the other.

Today, only the remnants of one mermaid remain – but not on the rock.  In a glass cabinet in Waverley Library at Bondi Junction all that is left of the two beautiful mermaids is a figure with half a face.  There’s a hole instead of a cheek, a dismembered torso, part of an uplifted arm, the tender groove of an armpit.  And there, down below, a complete fish’s tail.

Copyright © 2022 Libby Sommer

When people ask me where I get my ideas from, I tell them I use the world around me. Life is so abundant, if you can write down the actual details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else. Even if you relocate the French doors, fast-spinning overhead fan, small red Dell laptop, and low black kneeling chair from your office that you work in in Sydney into an Artist’s Atelier in the south of France at another time, the story will have truth and groundedness.

In Hermione Hoby’s interview with Elizabeth Strout in the Guardian newspaper, the Pulitzer prize winner said her stories have always begun with a person, and her eyes and ears are forever open to these small but striking human moments, squirreling them away for future use. “Character, I’m just interested in character,” she said.

“You know, there’s always autobiography in all fiction,” Strout said, referring to her novel, My Name is Lucy Barton. “There are pieces of me in every single character, whether it’s a man or a woman, because that’s my starting point, I’m the only person I know.” She went on to explain: “You can’t write fiction and be careful. You just can’t. I’ve seen it with my students over the years, and I think actually the biggest challenge a writer has is to not be careful. So many times students would say, ‘Well, I can’t write that, my boyfriend would break up with me.’ And I’d think, you have to do something that’s going to say something, and if you’re careful it’s just not going to work.”

At the launch of my debut novel My Year With Sammy, the MC Susanne Gervay OAM said: “Libby’s level of detail creates poignant insights into character and relationships. If people know Libby they may find themselves subtly entwined in one of her stories.”

On Goodreads’ website they locate The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath under “Autobiographical Fiction” and describe the book as Plath’s shocking, realistic, and intensely emotional novel about a woman falling into the grip of insanity: “Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther’s breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational—as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic.”

My advice to you, dear Reader, is to be awake to the details around you, but don’t be self-conscious. “So here it is. I’m at a Valentine’s Day party. It’s 33 degrees outside. The hostess is sweltering over a hot oven in the kitchen. She is serving up cheese and spinach triangles as aperitifs.” Relax, enjoy the party, be present with your eyes and ears open. You will naturally take it all in, and later, sitting at your desk, you will be able to remember just how it was to be eating outside in the heat under a canvas umbrella, attempting to make conversation with the people on either side of you, and thinking how you can best make an early exit.

In the interview with Elizabeth Strout in the Guardian, Strout said: “I don’t want to write melodrama; I’m not interested in good and bad, I’m interested in all those little ripples that we all live with. And I think that if one gets a truthful emotion down, or a truthful something down, it is timeless.”

Copyright © 2022 Libby Sommer

Have a read of my prose poem ‘The Ladder and Its Dangers’. It was longlisted for the 2019 joanne burns Microlit Award.

Available for inclusion in a range of multi-platform activities organised by Spineless Wonders including #storybombing NWF20, podcasts, live performance and the Microflix Awards.

Hope you enjoy the poem.

The Ladder and Its Dangers:  

It’s dizzying up there. You climb to the top shelves for whatever your mood requires:  on loneliness, weight reduction, a book of Basho’s Haiku and find half a dozen books you forgot you had which side tracks the initial quest, since now that you’ve located them you have to consider them. Will I ever reread this, recycle it in the street library? Of course, your reading interests are very different from the interests you had when you placed it alphabetically on the shelf.  Perhaps your interests have moved in a different direction now, maybe they’ve become more multi-cultural. Perhaps you think continuing to read Anita Brookner and her stories of loss and aloneness are not the best choice for you anymore. Your quest takes on a sedentary nature as you sit on the floor to search the lower shelves, scanning titles and author names. Possibly by now you’ve been up and down the ladder several times and been peering upwards for extended periods cutting off the blood supply to your neck. And you’ve stood up too quickly from the floor and are feeling totally off balance. Now you need to consider blood sugar levels, blood pressure, PEOPLE OVER SIXTY SHOULDN’T CLIMB LADDERS. Discombobulated for a while, you’re too preoccupied to recall what sent you up the ladder in the first place.

Copyright © 2019 Libby Sommer

Wishing you a happy and safe Christmas.

‘Stay safe, stay sanitised.’ – Kathy Lette