Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
She’s uncontrived unconventional. She wears black tracksuit pants with an elasticated waist and ribbed elasticated ankle bands. She never wears shoes and her feet are hard and dark like horses’ hooves. Her 11 year old daughter tells me that mum gardens all through the night which explains why her feet look like they’ve come from under the ground – grown from somewhere near the bamboo or hibiscus. There are no allocated bedrooms for her eight kids. They camp on couches, in corners, behind doors. Her daughter can sleep with people coming and going, with drug deals taking place in the lounge room, with a cat asleep on her face, outside or in the bathroom if she has to when the fighting gets too bad. Her 12 year old disabled son sits nude and smiling in the driveway, escaping sometimes to wander alone around the dark streets of the neighbourhood.
She’s the one who shuffles in with the cheap store bought cake in a brown paper bag to the primary school sports’ carnival and then leaves before she can watch her daughter win her race. She’s got a laugh that’s coarse and unapologetic and she sweats. Through every season she gleams like she’s emerged from the river. Once maybe she was considered attractive, possibly even stunning; now she wears scars from the bottles and bricks that have been thrown at her over the years. But even with sandpaper skin and tired pinned eyes, and perhaps because of it, she’s a character who intrigues, both fascinating and terrifying.