Excerpt:

Some scenes sizzle themselves into your brain without the benefit of a camera.

The doctor is looking at me carefully. There are pale rings around her irises.

Look in the eyes, you can always tell, said my sister, Gemma. Iris rings are a sure sign of too much salt…if they can’t look after themselves how can you trust them to look after you?

Angled on the X-Ray jammed against the window, the doctor’s fingers are puffy.
My lungs are shadowed wings. They want to burst through the glass into an up-draught of warm whirling air and, like the pelican I photographed yesterday above Noosa River, drift heavenwards far away from scrutiny.

"Do you see the shadow?"

Shadow on shadow. Raggedy, about the size of a fifty cent piece on the lower left lobe. Below my heart.
"I’ll book you in for a biopsy." She smiles encouragingly. "Early days… at this stage it would be as well not to worry."

But the darker shadow is furry and strangely moth-like. I can see it growing and blundering about in my body where it has no right to be.

“A shadow can mean many things. It could even be an old scar. Have you ever had tuberculosis?”
“My Aunty Ailsa did, when I was a child.”

“How interesting. You could have had a lesion and spontaneous healing.”

I startle her with my guffaw.
Seductive, but I can’t buy it. No. It’s my turn. I will be the second of my generation to detach from the branch. I tally up: father – liver; aunt – breast; sister - lymphoma. It’s in my family, the corrupt and rampant gene. And fear, its Siamese twin.

Home. I launch my red and silver sputnik and vacuum meticulously. I’m tempted to thrust the nozzle down my gullet to dislodge the shadow. Above my dressing table hangs a huntsman spider. But I can’t deal with her repellent dark softness, her twitchy legs. I take my secateurs into the garden, savagely prune a grevillea, return to the kitchen and stuff its golden arcs into a vase. Leaves fall to the floor. I bend over to pick them up. Something shifts inside and I start to wail. I crush the leaves in my hands and sniff their green juice. I sit on the floor and lean against the cupboards and cry. I feel as if I have run up a mountain. Every part of me aches and trembles.
I think of my two young sons, Gabriel and Cyrus. What will happen to them deprived of both parents? After my parents died I fled New Zealand, my two younger sisters eventually following. How I exchanged the lush Waikato Valley with its dark wings of macrocarpa trees for a land parched and tattered like a badly cured cow hide which I have learned to love. But the roots still clenched in my native soil tug sharper in moments of extremity.


Before dawn I pack my camera and cycle to the estuary. I wander the banks of Stumers Creek, its melaleuca-stained waters pouring out into the sea. There is a sudden whump and splash as a block of sand, undercut by the rushing water, abruptly falls. Erosion and deposition: the cutting away and building up, the giving and taking, the continual shuffling and reshuffling of sand into new forms. I study the complex and ever changing patterns formed by the streaming water, its secret glides and slants. Ribbons, ripples and curlicues of gold twist and curve. I set my camera to wide aperture and the fastest shutter speed, 4000th of a second to capture a fleeting sliver of time. Better than meditation and much better than valium my camera works its predictable magic. I am embedded in bright wonder where no shadows dare intrude.

Click. Time stops. A name anchors: Freeze Flow.

A lifetime of taking photographs and writing articles causes me to automatically anchor the telling scenes in my mind with a title.

Up in the dunes is my sprawling banksia providing patchy shade for an hour or so. From my bag I fish out a water bottle and my sister Gemma’s blue sarong. I spread it out and lie down drawing up the sides like a canoe and rock a little. I see her face. Not the sharp bone face in the coffin but the image I framed in gold and placed on my desk after she died. Strands of hair brush across her forehead like ribbons of light. That was twelve years ago. She was only forty eight. Before she died, I remember my excitement at finding three sarongs patterned with waves and palm trees, but in different shades of blue. One for each sister. Symbols of solidarity. Mine is indigo, that mysterious in-between colour of the ocean at dusk when water and sky coalesce. I imagine death to be like that, the deepest blue infused with the sun’s dying rays. I gave middle sister, Claire, the lapis lazuli sarong for her bright spirit, and Gemma, the pale thrush egg blue that makes you believe in heaven.

Perhaps I hoped for a rub-off effect, for the youngest to take on the rude health of her older sisters, in the same way as by eating the heart of a chief a Maori warrior was thought to take on his courage. When I studied anthropology I discovered this desired effect was known as ‘sympathetic magic’.

Gemma in her coffin: The Fallacy of Sympathetic Magic.




© Rose Allan

Published in Antipodes, a North American Journal of Australian Literature, Dec.2009

Commended, Shoalhaven Literary Award