Excerpt:

Morning. The tide far out. Its last gesture a sheet of light flung across the sand. Josie is walking on light, on clouds. Her feet make soft dinosaur splodges, which fill in and smooth over as if they never existed.

But she does not feel insubstantial. She is breaking up inside. An iron band compresses her lungs and heart, impeding the flow of air and blood. Her bowels are roiling. Beneath her black and glittering hair, ribbed with silver like moonlight on the estuary, they are at it again, defendant and prosecutor, like children intent on scoring the last blow.

‘Meat!’
‘Spirit!’
‘Meat!’
‘Spirit!’
‘Meat – God damn it!’

Josie never knows what the voices will come up with. It’s like throwing out a line into the abyss and taking a chance on hauling in a sliver of light, or a sightless monster of the deep.

‘Being normal’s hard enough. They’re too different.’
‘We all are. Square pegs dreaming of something other.’
‘But we can dissemble, play the game.’
‘They’re happy. They laugh. We can love and protect them.’
‘And when you die?’

The trouble is Josie can no longer sort out the rules of the game, which voice is on whose side, nor who they are barracking for: God, herself, society, or her baby. Frankly, she is fed up with this inter-cranial warfare. She craves the sweet simplicity of black and white, right and wrong, a medieval morality, tribal lore – anything but the grey shifting sands of twentieth century uncertainty.

Anyway, what’s the point now? It’s water – blood under the bridge.
Mudjimba Beach has dried out. Baked sea-wasp bladders pop beneath her feet. But she does not register. Normally, Josie would be screwing up her eyes, scanning heaven for eagles and terns, the water for metallic curve of dolphin, the sand for driftwood to take home and photograph, side-lit, the better to reveal life’s little gnawings. Today a turtle humped in her path would signal no more than a rock, an obstacle to walk around. The real world of light and dazzle, shape and form is diminished, is less significant than a memory.
 

Josie is walking again down the white corridors, looking at workshops and play areas, hearing the bright voices.
‘Say hello to the lady, Karen dear. She has come to see how happy you are. And this is Ben. He’s very clever with his hands. Aren’t you Ben?’

She stares at their play-dough faces, their tell-tale slanting eyes. At their bodies that don’t do much, Peter Pans who cannot fly. Undone for want of a chromosome.

As she leaves, their ripe, Buddha-belly laughter tears her heart, perhaps gladdens her baby nestled beneath.


The air is salt and urgent. A pair of oyster catchers stab the sand with their dagger beaks. A cormorant plunges and surfaces, gulping. All this he will never know.

Josie stops her slow tread northwards, turns right and walks into the waves up to her knees. The sea swirls around her soggy jeans and tugs. She lifts up her head, opens her mouth wide and bellows.

Mudjimba Island rocks on its foundation, seabirds spat the sky, a fisherman further up the beach thinks of sea-cows and drowning men. Josie bellows once, twice, thrice. Clutching her throat which feels as if she has swallowed a sea-urchin, she staggers ashore. Holding her belly with one hand and ignoring the pain of her scar, she runs along the beach towards the stoic bulk of Mount Coolum.





© Rose Allan
Published in Social Alternatives, May 1995