All posts by Princess Sparkle

Choc-choc chip pancakes (because one kind of choc is never enough!) – Shari Cohen

Gunnas-Masters

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER

I don’t normally have an affinity for pancakes. Waffles, muffins and croissants – now they speak my language. But pancakes and I have never really connected on a deeper level. Too thick, too stodgy, too large, too overcooked, too undercooked…one would think something so simple wouldn’t be so hard to get right. Despite my chequered history with the dish, I still occasionally get a craving. And so, these pancakes were created. My preference is for small ones – no more than a few bites – but I won’t judge you if you opt for a larger version.

Ingredients:

150g plain flour

2t baking powder

60g sugar

20g corn flour

20g cocoa

20g flavourless oil, such as grapeseed

1 ¼ cups almond milk

2t vanilla essence

A very large handful of chocolate chips (who am I to tell you how to live your life? Just make sure there’s not more chocolate chips than batter – it could get messy!)

Oil for frying (depending on your frypan)

How to:

Whisk the flour, baking powder, sugar, corn flour and cocoa together to mix the ingredients well and remove any lumps.

Add the oil, milk and vanilla and stir until you have a smooth, silky mixture.

Heat some oil in a frying pan over a medium-high heat (unless you have a magical non-stick pan that really doesn’t need any).

Place large spoonfuls of mixture into the hot pan and cook for 2-3 minutes. Wait until the mixture starts to bubble before flipping.

Top with syrup, sauce, ice cream, berries or your indulgence of choice.

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100 million years is a fucking long time – Alison Dorman

Gunnas-Masters

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER

In front of me, there is a rock. It’s fist-sized, grey sandstone spattered with fragments of black coal, and protruding gently near the centre is a blob of brown. The brown blob is obviously not part of the rock – its surface is smooth, the edges curving down, and a shallow groove runs down the middle.

It’s one thing to think that this rock was sand at the bottom of a river channel 100 million years ago, and that those flecks of coal were bits of Mesozoic vegetation, twigs and leaves and bark that were carried in the current. But that sand and those twigs settled around the bone of a dinosaur, an animal that lived and breathed and died in an unimaginably distant past. Its bone wasn’t brown then, nor was it crazed with tiny cracks or faintly warped. It hardly seems possible that this little bone still exists at all, let alone in a recognisable shape.

How do you even wrap your head around 100 million years? One million seems impossible; a hundred of them is just silly.

One hundred years ago, there were still empires with proper royalty. Women couldn’t vote in most countries, everything was steam-powered, aeroplanes were probably still something of a novelty, and humanity was just getting acquainted with the idea of warfare on an industrial scale.

One thousand years ago, everyone ate organic heirloom crops and grass-fed meat because there wasn’t anything else. Europeans were confined to Europe. English didn’t exist as a language.

If you multiply that thousand years by another thousand, you get a million. We know a lot about what life on earth was like a million years ago – there were no modern humans, for example. But that doesn’t help when you try to imagine all those years passing, at more or less the same speed that they pass today.

This little brown blob of bone has been trapped, cradled, protected in this rock for one hundred million years. It has survived all this time in the darkness as the sand turned to stone, until some curious human dug it out of a shore platform before the waves could erode it. Left alone, it would have gradually been exposed to the sun once more, then washed away, bit by bit, to finally be recycled as new sediment.

But instead, someone dug it up, and now my task is to tease it out of the rock, so we can learn what sort of dinosaur it belonged to, what function it may have served when it was part of a living creature.

The tiny hand-held jackhammer buzzes in my hand as I chip away at the hard sandstone. The tip catches on an even harder bit of mudstone mixed in with the sand, then leaps forward, the movement uncontrolled.

One hundred million years disintegrates in a spray of tiny brown crumbs.

Oh, fuck.

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I hate deadlines – Lisa Gillick

Gunnas-Masters

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER

#1 I lit a fag on my own, it was stolen fag from my Mum’s Rothmans packet on the kitchen bench. I choked and gagged, I was about 12 or 13. I always have a little Bic lighter in my car because I still like a ciggie when I am out and having a drink. I impersonate all members of my family past and present in the way they smoked. I still blow smoke rings with my Sister sometimes.My Mum kept her lighters in her bra, sometimes two or three of the, Mum had a very large bosom and lots of space in between to stash fags and lighters. She could always whip out a light if you didn’t have one.

#2 It was expensive to go out for dinner, almost unheard of when you grow up in a Housing Commission home in Frankston and there are seven kids in the family. It was expensive to buy homes,own cars, pay for school fees, school books,  school uniforms, eat steak, go to the Dentist or Doctor, just about everything was costly but fags were cheap as chips. 11 or 12 cents for a packet of Escourt or Viscount 10’s and they could be hidden easily in your bra or undies.
#3 We used to hang out at the  front of George Pannagakis’s milk bar with the gang and a durrie in our gobs.
#4 One night my Mum appeared at the milk bar in her nightie and dressing gown with her rollers under her scarf and said “Lisa I know you are there, get home this minute. And put that cigarette out on the way!” Shame job in front of my friends.
I miss having a ciggie with my Mum.
Ran out of time to write up Promt  #5 and #6.
I hate deadlines.
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Chocolate cake – Alexandra Eather

Gunnas-Masters

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER


I can make the best chocolate cake you have ever eaten. And I really like making chocolate cake, so that’s a good combination. It’s the only cake my six year old daughter likes to eat.

The reason I can make such an amazing chocolate cake is that I have a cake cookbook called ‘The Cake Bible’ by an American woman called Rose Levy Beranbaum. I found out about her from Stephanie Alexander’s book, ‘The Cook’s Companion’. Stephanie says ‘anyone who is passionate about cake-making must read this book’. That’s what I did, and what a revelation it’s been.

The Cake Bible is a such a good cookbook not only because the recipes work every time without fail, but because it’s a really good read. For a cake nerd like me it’s fascinating, because Rose goes into all the reasons why you need to follow her instructions, how it will make your cake better, and what will happen if you do things differently. She explains, for example, the technicalities of why you need to put proportionally less baking powder in to your cake mix if you have a larger cake. I love this. (It’s to do with surface tension.) She even tells you how long to mix for, and how much your eggs should weigh without their shells. The less anal among us may choose not to go to this level of exactness, but it’s there if you want it. And it’s probably why all the cakes in the book work perfectly every time.


The chocolate cake I make is called ‘Perfect all-American chocolate butter cake’. Honestly, how can you go past a cake with a name like that? I seriously did not know how good Americans were at cakes until I made this one (and until I went to New York). This is not like a mud cake, which I think are horribly sickly sweet and heavy. It’s rich and dark at the same time as being light and crumbly and buttery.

Mostly I just make one layer but you can make two. It’s best the day it’s been baked when it’s soft and moist and velvety. You can also freeze it. You can ice it with buttercream, or water icing, or even just dust it with icing sugar.

I have made this cake for most of my daughter’s birthday parties and the parents come asking if it’s the one from that cake book and can they have a piece, because they remember it from the year before. I made it for my aunt’s ninetieth birthday a couple of years ago.  I did two layers and covered it with cream and filled it with morello cherries and more cream. It was delicious.

I have never had a failure from The Cake Bible (except for the time I forgot to put the sugar in the chocolate cake!). Whenever I make something from it, people say ‘wow, where did you get this recipe?’.  It’s a wonderful cookbook and the chocolate cake is one way to make yourself and the people you are feeding just that little bit happier.

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The Pink Bangle – Joan Benjamin

Gunnas-Masters

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER

The first time I saw my Amah, no, I’m not sure it was the first time I saw her, rather it was my earliest memory of her. She was playing with the beautiful pink bangle on her arm. I can still see her sitting on the verandah. My memories before then would have been of her holding me and so I wouldn’t have seen her as a whole person. She was twisting the bangle and she had a dreamy, happy, smile on her face and she wasn’t focussed on me. I later recalled the image of her and asked her about the bangle.

She smiled, it was a gentle smile, not a big smile and she said it was a very expensive bangle, I wonder now if she didn’t mean very valuable. She told me her mother gave it to her just as her grandmother had given it to her mother. It was part of the family’s treasure that they had brought with them from a land far away. “How is it expensive” I asked? “What is it made of?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but it is very precious, because it has been in my family for a very long time”.

Just then we were interrupted by a commotion out in the street and we were running, running, running and my father swept me up and dragging my mother we ran down to the docks. I didn’t see my amah again. I never got the chance to ask her more about the bangle. I didn’t get to see her for many years.

I now know that a revolution was happening in that country and we had to get out fast. My father had been preparing for this because he had a tramp steamer fuelled and waiting at the docks for us. It had been seemingly making repairs, no one suspected that it was waiting for anyone in particular. But it was ready, fuelled and ready to get us away.

Many years later I was able to return to the country and although much had changed I was able to make inquiries about the family of my amah and was able to trace them back to their original village. I was able to drive the twenty miles or so and I found the family of my amah and my amah herself. We recognised each other and she proudly held up her daughter for me to see. Her daughter was wearing the beautiful pink bangle.

*********

If I was to have a second story to share and this was the first one in the workshop where we had to write for 5 minutes without stopping it was this.
I think that the book ‘Spinster’ by Sylvia Ashton Warner is a perfect example of how fiction can convey a really important message. (We talked about this earlier in the workshop) Sylvia, the author, turned her experience into a novel where she described her experience of arriving in an isolated Maori village (in the 40s I think) as a young teacher. It was a one teacher school. She struggled to teach the children using the standard New Zealand readers which featured Jane and Dick and their Pets Spot and Fluffy. They all lived with their middle class mum and dad and dad would do dad things like wash the car on the weekend and mum was always pictured wearing a frilly apron.
 
Sylvia invented new reading materials based on the events her children described to her every day. Stories about fights and killing and blood and hate and love and kissing.  The point of all this is that Sylvia went to on to become quite famous in New Zealand and the US as an educator responsible for developing the Key Word Reading Scheme.  The novel set the scene, provided the context (and made a bloody good novel) that led to significant changes in the way reading was taught in New Zealand and some progressive schools in the US.  The novel was written and published before her book ‘Teacher’ and the acceptance of her innovative reading scheme.

@joanbenjoan

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The Orange Ribbon – Susannah Eliott

Gunnas-Masters

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER

The first time I thought about death was when I was 8. It was a cold morning and I sat in the kitchen looking out through the frosty glass. There was no prompt. No TV blearing death statistics or the death of an aging uncle. Not even a mangled pet dog on the side of the road. I just stared out into the mist and knew that one day I would die. It was not a negative thought, there was no self-pity. Simply an awareness that it was inevitable that one day I would look back on this day from the moment of my death. It would be a sunny afternoon I decided, and I’d be under a tree with dappled light, looking up at the sky and I would remember my 8 year old self.

It was awkward explaining my fascination with death to my parents.  An 8 year old fascinated with death? There must be something wrong with her. Look at her arms. Has she been self-harming? Showing signs of social anxiety? Fear of the dark? ADHD, bipolar, gender dysphoria, prepubescent post-traumatic stress related anorexia?

Next minute was a thought that came and went. One minute I was staring out a misty window. The next minute was life and the minute after that was death.

It was the wrong door or perhaps the wrong moment in time. “Watch out!” the tradie yelled meaninglessly as I stepped through the large grey door on the 5th floor of number 8 Pitchfork Drive. I had been through that door a hundred times but this time the outside metal staircase was gone. In that second I realised what the orange ribbon across the door had meant. How could I not see it?

Next minute I was on the ground looking up at the sky, every part of my body broken. How did I never notice how beautiful the clouds are on a sunny afternoon? No fear, no pain, no sound. Just deep blue never ending nothingness.

“Sorry, What?” I heard an angry voice yell. Terrified faces above me, blocking the sun. “I’m sorry sir, they can’t get an ambulance out here for another 15 minutes. The terrorist attack on Eighth Avenue has taken all the resources”. “She could be dead by then”.  It suddenly occurred to me that I was probably dying. Is this what death was like? From nowhere came a frosted window. A young girl was smiling and waving at me, a long orange ribbon in her hair.

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50-SOMETHING NOT OUT – Mary Goldsmith

Gunnas-Masters

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER

I’m a 50-something career coach, and perilously close to the age my father retired. Dad relished his new-found freedom, a well-earned reward for his loyalty to King and country. But like many other boomer women, I’m not ready to quit just yet.

Collectively, we have buckets of expertise and wisdom to give a multi-generational workforce. Yet when redundancy is imposed upon my contemporaries, many of them dissolve into a puddle of insecurities. Their lack of confidence and self-worth are palpable. Learning and development has often been neglected, and performance reviews overlooked. While our coaching sessions offer a temporary safe harbour, these women aren’t always ready for the job market. They’re their own worst publicist.

If you’re a woman over 50 who wants and/or needs to continue working for the foreseeable future, audit your employability and take steps to build career resilience. Seize on free training and update your skills. Identify and articulate your strengths, and keep a journal of the projects, accomplishments and other contributions you make on the job. Consider a ‘side-gig’ – something you enjoy, you’re good at, and offers a secondary cash-flow stream. Become both mentor and mentee to keep abreast of trends and technology. And watch your language – self-deprecating ageist remarks should be avoided at all costs!

While conscious career management takes time and energy, the investment will help us to ride the workplace rollercoaster, and make career moves on our terms, until we decide to glide to retirement.

careerstylenotes.com

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Cake O’Clock – Tracy Dawson

Gunnas-Masters

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER

Strawberry millefeuille. Ultimate comfort food. A confection created in heaven by God herself. You can keep your chocolate chip muffins Nigella.  It’s millefeuille or the highway.  And as I turn the corner into the market square I see another confection of sorts. A flamingo pink van with a fold down counter and “Cake O’Clock” emblazoned on its side in a zany font.   I lumber over with my shopping bags to check it out.   Adventurous cup cakes, towering muffins, cinnamon rolls, mousse affairs with banana and coconut, and the ubiquitous carrot cake.  Sorry,  but carrots have no business being in a cake. There’s a sumptuous dark chocolate treat named “Sweet Revenge”. Decadence chocolatified but it’s just not calling my name.  Bingo! They have  respectable looking strawberry millefeuilles in a glass dome.  There’s three layers  and it looks like real cream, not that cheap pale custardy crud that some bakers inflict on the unwary.  With identifiable pieces of strawberry  and the merest dusting of icing sugar to finish off  it is indeed ‘Cake O’clock”.

The assistant turns to me. I see his name badge first. It reads “Lex”.  As if.  What’s wrong with a simple Alex?  

 “Good afternoon madam. What can I get for you?” He smiles and his hazel eyes crinkle at the edges. My insides go molten.  He has lovely teeth. Nice and even.  People who research this stuff say that we make up our minds in seconds about someone we meet.  A process called thin slicing. And here he is asking me about cake. How appropriate.  He’s so good looking that a titter bubbles up inside me and I have to clamp my mouth shut to save myself from embarrassment.

 He must be a plant and I’m the unsuspecting victim in a reality TV programme. Where are the hidden cameras?  He looks at me expectantly. I realise that I’ve been gazing at him.

“Sorry?” I’ve forgotten the question.

“ What would you like?” 

  “Er…well….I…er” trying to recover. 

 “The Sweet Revenge is out of this world if you’re a chocolate lover”, he prompts. That smile, those eyes, be still my beating heart.  If only I could prolong this encounter.  Pull yourself together Sally.

“Revenge does sound sweet , but I’m millefeuille tragic. So I’ll take one of those thanks”. 

I watch as he places the pastry in a white box with greaseproof paper and a dainty fork and deftly ties a knot with pink ribbon. He looks to be in his early 40’s.  Short hair, Dirty Blonde I think it’s called. He looks like a Lex.    No wedding ring. Nicely manicured  nails. Strong, capable hands. Maybe he’s gay. Not that I have a hope in hell. But no, mustn’t think like that. Be positive.  Think of something to say quick, I urge myself. 

Then as I take the box we both start speaking at the same time. We laugh and shake our heads at the off timing.  He’s asking me for the money, and I’m saying “Who thought up the name for the chocolate cake then?”  Ouch. Clunky opening line.  Dear Ground, please open and swallow me up.

“Sweet Revenge? I did. It’s dark, tempting, forbidden, sinful.  It gets people talking.”   I gulp and hope he doesn’t notice.

“Is that so?” I say.  

“Well, we’re talking now aren’t we?” Touché.

I can’t produce a witty reposte so I mumble something like “That’s true”.  

I’m flustered and as I hand over the money I drop my purse and  the coins roll under the van.   Shit. I feel myself reddening and imagine how he must see me. Bumbling, middle aged and in thrall to treacherous  hormones.  Stupid, stupid woman.

 I bend down to retrieve the contents and he’s out of the van and helping me.  He hands me my purse, glancing at the driving licence in the clear pocket at the front.  

“Well Ms Sally Forth, it was a pleasure meeting you.  Stop by again soon. I’d love to continue our chat”.  

I take the purse, balance the cake box on top of my shopping.  Is he taking the mickey?  I look at him, my bullshit meter in overdrive.  I can’t tell any more.  I need to go home now. 

 He turns and climbs back in the van to serve the next customer.  Yes, Sally Forth.    A hale and hearty, rucksack -on- my -back kind of name. Hate the outdoors. Zero wanderlust.    I’ve thought about changing my name, but it’s an enormous faff.  If I could be arsed, I would become Ms Fraise Millefeuille.  I get home, stuff my face, take the dog round the block, sink a bottle of wine and go to bed. 

 

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Old Friends – Joanne Waugh

Gunnas-Masters

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER

 

The first time I noticed Jane was an arsehole was not long after we met and struck up a friendship in Year 9. I was visiting her home for the first time and her mum offered to order us a pizza for tea. I was delighted, pizza was a rare treat in my family. Jane was less pleased and simply said, ‘no, just make us something’. I think it took me longer to recover from the shock of that exchange between them than it did for her mum to whip us up some spaghetti bolognese. We went to the dining room to eat, but Jane took one look in our bowls and declared it to be ‘shit’, to which her mum responded by offering to order a pizza.

By that time I had already decided that this new friend was not going to hang around long enough to become an old friend, but the spectacle and foreignness of this family dynamic was fascinating enough to at least complete the sleepover. Jane’s mum ordered pizza and we eventually ate. Jane helped herself to ice cream for dessert without offering me any and over the following weeks I successfully distanced myself from her by joining the school concert band. We fell into different social circles and I thought that was one arsehole well avoided.

Until a few weeks ago. I turned up to my cousin Lucy’s interstate wedding to fulfil my role of bridesmaid, and who should be cast in the role of maid of honour? The arsehole herself. I couldn’t believe it. Jane greeted me like an old friend, hugging and fussing and generally being disturbingly friendly given our status as strangers. At the rehearsal dinner I manged to find ten minutes with Lucy to try to understand why she was friends with this maniac. Lucy had met Jane through work five years ago, and they’d been best friends ever since. I related my history with Jane and Lucy was dismissive.

‘Don’t you find her a bit… much?’ I asked tactfully.

‘Oh come on, that was high school. She’s nice. She really helped me when Greg left me, and she’s been so helpful with the wedding. Really. You should give her a chance.’

Some relatives came and swept Lucy away for photos and I was left with her brother, Sam.

‘You know Jane?’ He nodded towards the arsehole, who was dancing rather more wildly than the slinky strapless dress she had on was built to tolerate.

‘Oh yes, I think so.’ I gave him a knowing look. I knew I could count on Sam for the straight story.

‘I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Tomorrow is going to be a disaster.’

‘What was the first shoe?’ This sounded ominous and not unexpected.

‘Lucy has not made a single decision about this wedding without consulting Jane. It might as well be her up in white. Mu’s spitting chips. He wanted to use the GTO, but Jane said it was too ‘old’ and somehow now they’re renting pink stretch Hummers.’ Sam wrinkled his nose at the mention of the ghastly vehicles. It was strange that they would hire cars when Mu had spent so long restoring his own classic car.

‘Why is Lucy listening to Jane?’

‘Search me? Since she met that girl she’s been hopeless. It’s like she’s in love with her and Mu is the dropped friend.’

‘So what kind of drama are you expecting tomorrow?’

‘Oh, it’s anyone’s guess, but I’ll meet you at the bar when it all goes down.’ He clinked my glass and sauntered off towards a group of Lucy’s uni friends.

The morning of the wedding had been rushed but not stressful, I’d certainly handled more stressed brides. Lucy was anxious about not leaving Mu waiting for too long, whatever traditional dictated. Jane had been rather more peppy than was appropriate for the morning, but there was nothing dramatic aside from a small kerfuffle about her dress being shut in the wardrobe door for a moment, oh, and the fact that Lucy had touched her smoothie bowl before Jane had taken a photo for Instagram. Hair and make up had been blissfully uneventful and before we knew it we were dressing and making final preparations to leave. That’s when the trouble started.

Lucy had been telling me she was planning to wear our grandmother’s pearls as her ‘something old’. She had been left them when grandma Hughes died, and I knew this meant a lot to her as they’d been very close. I’d received grandma’s collection of old cameras, which were much more useful! As Lucy was talking about the pearls she headed to the dresser to grab them.

‘Where are they? I left them right here this morning.’ Lucy’s voice rose half a tone.

‘Maybe they fell down the side.’ I tried to keep my voice low and quiet. Lucy’s movement was somewhat restricted in her mermaid style dress, so I got down on the floor and swept the area. No pearls.

‘Are you sure you left them here?’

‘Yes. Yes! I took out my jewellery and my bag and put it all here first thing today. Right before I had my shower.’ Panic was starting to hit now. Lucy grabbed her phone off the bed to call Mu, or anyone at their house to check the bedroom there. While she tried to get through to him, Jane returned from wherever she had been, probably having her own private Insta-ready photo shoot without ruining her aesthetic.

‘What’s going on?’

‘We can’t find the pearls?

‘What pearls?’ Jane’s eyes were wide, her hands stretched wide.

‘The ones she planned to wear, our grandma’s.’ I watched Jane carefully. Something about this was not right. Jane seemed to controlling this whole event but she didn’t know which pearls?

‘Oh, is that all?’ Jane turned back to her preparations, seemingly unfazed by this hitch in her fastidiously planned morning.

Lucy ended her call with Tom, one of the groomsmen, shaking her head.

‘They can’t see them at home either. I can’t believe this, how could I have lost them. And today?’ Lucy was close to tears, which wasn’t going to bode well for her fresh make up. I took her hands and tried to keep her calm.

‘I know how much they mean to you. We will find them, but maybe not for the ceremony. But you know grandma will still her here to see this.’ This was how desperate I was getting, I had no such belief in the afterlife, but I knew Lucy liked this idea. Slowly, she shook her head, I could see she was adjusting to the idea that it was going ahead without the jewellery she had planned.

‘Aw, come on Luce,’ Jane interjected, ‘those pearls didn’t really match your dress anyway, so old school.’

My spidey senses were set off immediately by this comment. Right then, I would have bet everything I had that Jane had had something to do with the missing pearls. But, one look at Lucy told me now was not the time to start hurling accusations around.

‘Your dress is gorgeous, and you are luminous, no one would have even noticed those pearls.’ I tried to summon some enthusiasm for this line of ‘cheering up’ that Jane had started.

Lucy smiled shakily and nodded. ‘You’re right, this is one small thing. Something always has to go wrong, doesn’t it.’ I squeezed her hands, yes, one small thing.

‘Come on ladies, we don’t want to keep Mu waiting, who knows when he’ll come to his senses and run off!’ Jane impatiently gestured for us to get out the door she was holding.

I started towards the door, and just as I reached it I heard Lucy say, ‘Oh wait, my phone.’ She ran, as best she could in taht crazy tight dress, around the bed to pick up her phone. As she went to come back her foot caught on something on the floor and she almost fell. Catching herself on the bed she stayed there, half bent over for another beat, as if she’d been frozen.

‘Luce, come ON!’ Jane almost bellowed at her, looking out the door at the waiting pink abominations.

Still Lucy stared at something on the floor, not moving. Since she wasn’t responding I went towards her to see what the problem was. She wasn’t going to have some sort of anxiety attack or bout of cold feet was she? I wasn’t ready to handle that level of breakdown. As I came around the end of the bed I saw what she was starting at; the pearls. They been thrown out of Jane’s tote bag when Lucy’s foot caught the end of it.

‘Lucy?’ I caught her eye and raised my eyebrows. Her face was like nothing I’d ever seen from her before, stone cold. Even with all that make up on she was white with rage, and I was pretty keen to get out of firing range. I peeked back at Jane, who still hasn’t realised that she was busted. We didn’t have time for a huge confrontation right now. Mu, and everyone else, were waiting for Lucy already.

I took a step back and held my hands up in a gesture to wait to Lucy.

‘All right? Ready?’ I gave Lucy a meaningful glance.

‘Yea… Yes.’ She nodded, keeping a lid on the no doubt strong feelings boiling away inside. I turned towards Jane and walked outside, Lucy following close behind. We boarded the waiting car (surely one does not just get into such a huge vehicle), Jane being the last one in.

Once we were all in, I said, ‘Oh no! I forgot Lucy’s bag. Jane, would you mind grabbing it quickly?’

‘Jesus Sally, you had one job.’ Jane rolled her eyes like a mad horse and huffed her way out of the car.

As soon as she was out I told the driver to leave. He hesitated for half a moment, before I repeated my instruction at top volume and he took off, Lucy grabbing my arm.

‘We can’t just leave her here!’

‘Why not? That bitch just stole our grandmother’s pearls and tried to ruin your wedding day.’

Lucy half-giggled and half-sobbed, ‘she’ll kill me’.

But her face ultimately broke out into a huge grin and I knew Jane wasn’t going to be one of her old friends either. We both collapsed into a storm of giggles, which was a real workout while crammed into those tight dresses. By the time we made it to the ceremony Lucy was thankfully back in good spirits, in fact almost on a high about having ditched Jane like a stone cold queen. We could deal with the fallout later. That was the last time I noticed that Jane was an arsehole. For now.

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The Drowning – Jude Oliphant.

Gunnas-Masters

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER

The rip tide pulled me out to deep water. Tumbled me over beyond breathing, deep turquoise milky churned turmoil, tossing me about with powerful oceanic rhythm – up was down, down was up. I was thirteen years old. Head up in the air at last, but I forgot to gasp, too busy listening to all the happy screams of fun and summer, trying to orient myself to the beach. Too busy thinking of the trouble I would be in for going out so far. Pulled down again, I screamed out the last of my breath in the next plunge and for wonder had the presence of mind to not inhale. My head hit sand, disoriented limbs thrashing, I turned and pushed off the bottom with piston legs, the strength of fear, rocketing upward to air. Inhale! Drawn down, again. Down over and beyond a drop off, deeper than before. Dumped on the ancient rock-crush and shells made grit over a billion years especially for abrading my elbows and knees on that day. A point in geological time brought to meet the flesh of a child on a beach in Australia. Sand scooped and congregating in the crotch and bottom of my bathers, making me heavier. The water grabbing shoulder straps and pulling down the top of my bathers exposing my robust teen body, shame filled, clutching at the straps, even in my drowning I was thinking of dire-mother consequences. Body is sinful.
Fighting to the top again. A breath! Yes, a breath deep but with spray, don’t cough, do not cough. With my brain filled with oxygen, the return of knowledge, drummed into me from five years old at Surf Life Saving Nipper’s Club. I can swim. A Holy Remembrance of the Swimmer’s Way.
Swim out of this, go sideways across the rip, swim and breathe. Swim and breathe, swim and breathe. Arm over arm, past the shelf, towards the shore, catch the wave and body-surf in. Legs kicking strong, shoulders and arms square now.  Feet touch the bottom in a momentary triumphant landing. Then shaking, a brief crying-in-fright, now I’m safe. I could hear nothing but the thundering of my own heart and the rasp of my own elemental breath. The essence of life, learned.
All childish merriment and the beach cricket games going on around me receded to a mute slow-motion show. “Thank you breath.” I prayed as I dumped out my sandy bather bottoms and straightened my straps.
I walked shocked up the beach towards our family’s spot on the busy beach – toward our red and white umbrella, the brown and orange checkered wool rug and wicker picnic basket. Then, flooded with the realisation that I could have let go, I should of let go, but life is irresistible even when you want to die. And what do thirteen year olds know of death? Just a wishing to cease to be. That moment was when my father took my photograph. He didn’t see me almost drown. Throughout my childhood he was always there behind the camera, watching life through his distant lens, but never present. I survived.
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