Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
Like a virgin, touched for the very first time …
Niamh sang in the bathroom. I remember. The intermittent clanging of the various bathroom bits, the pressure of the water streaming through the pipes. The stereo, muffled by the echo-y surrounds of tiles and water and glass. I remember. I remember Madonna, and I remember my sister.
…
Outside ‘the temple’ in the unwaveringly harsh January Hamilton sun, it was difficult to seek shade. The building in front of me acted as a reflector; a beacon of white and concrete, welcoming the light and casting it fiercely onto those around it. I looked on as people started to gather, cameras in hand, like they’d done it before, like they knew what was happening. Elderly in various items of cultural dress, children with suit shirts with elastic-necked ties, pretty dresses and prescribed futures. The odd stranger, like me, standing awkwardly, trying to treat it like a regular wedding. I don’t belong here. Neither does she. My parents arrived, separately, and my mother approached me. What happens now? I wasn’t sure. I thought I knew, from what I’d read, but that’s part of it: the secrecy.
…
Look! I told her, as we scrambled to the top of the statement piece of the playground, a rocket ship with a staircase up the guts. We lived in a new area; one that was slowly becoming dotted with new houses, new schools, new doctors’ surgeries, new fish and chip shops. We’d come from a smaller, older neighbourhood, so to be amongst all this shiny new stuff, new concrete, new life, it was brilliant.
We sat at the top of the rocket. The breeze whispered through the little circle windows and the sun had warmed the fibreglass. No dicks were drawn on the walls (not yet). No one had melted holes anywhere. No bongs on the ground. Just new. I took a pair of yellow handled school scissors from my little backpack. Wanna cut my hair?
…
The spirit was so strong in the temple today. I am so grateful for Heavenly Father’s plan and for eternal marriage.
This is bananas (!!!). Niamh and I smoked weed together in our garage when our parents were asleep. I covered for her when she snuck out to go and get busy with whatshisface in year eleven. She got a tattoo on her forearm when our mother thought she was at a uni orientation (mum’s reaction was brilliant). She was really nice and really welcoming to my first girlfriend when my parents thought it was a bit weird that I was a homo.
And now she’s a Mormon.
——–
I chose this, moving to Melbourne, being myself, asserting myself, choosing what I love, who I love. It’s been a bit of an unravelling; maybe a coming out of its own. I am not anything or anywhere because my parents or their parents chose it (except for all of the parts that are that way, of course). I’m here because I chose it. Maybe we all are, yet I’m still taken by the idea that all it would have taken is for someone sneeze on my partner’s nan on the bus home from work to give her a cold and cancel a date with the tall handsome fella who wanted court her, and I’d have never had our little house with our forty house plants, our too-many bikes, our squabbles about whether pegs belong on the line or in the peg bag (they obviously belong in the peg bag).
What did I decide, and what was decided for me?
Far better off, far worse. My stepdad is insistent about relativity. He doesn’t approve of my mum’s wishes to redecorate because there’s someone (some millions) with dirt floors in Africa.
I’m somewhere in the middle, I think. I teach a boy who was born in Syria; who came to Australia as a refugee. He loves Australia for its sunshine and its railway system and its safety.
I’ve experienced an unfair share too, in this sunshine-y, railway-d, safe home. But I’m not from Syria. I haven’t been terrified of terrorism.
I dance around, back and forth, between gratitude and envy. I’m envious, surely, of the kids who went on holidays or the kids who went to school with beautiful blazers and ironed shirts; of the kids who lived in houses with staircases, or whose parents didn’t stash a Gatorade bottle bong under the bathroom sink, or whose only positive childhood memory of her father is that one early morning pancake breakfast at the the home of the Canberra Raiders. I’m envious, no doubt, of the kids whose parents had the headspace or the wherewithal to recognise trauma-induced angst, or the kids who didn’t wear too-small boots to school, or who didn’t have to meet their dad in the Dickson McDonald’s carpark on Christmas morning only to catch a Greyhound bus to Melbourne with the man who had no more than 10 dollars to feed three kids on an overnight bus ride (a piece buttered toast at a road stop in Albury for your Christmas dinner leaves a bit to be desired, I have to say). I’m envious of any ten year old child who only knows about sex in abstract terms, like ewwww or mum and dad need some adult time.
Maybe it’s not envy. Maybe it’s more like if only you knew.
But how dare I complain. No gassing, no suicide bombers, no dirt floors. Just regular Aussie white bread and margarine misery.
I’m perhaps some kind of invisible inbetweener. One with a tough-ish, poor-ish, abuse-ish, broken-ish childhood. To make sense of it, what do I hold on to? What do I abandon? What do I use to fuel empathy, and what do I humble myself with?
This is choosing it.