the shearing shed

Last night I dreamed about our old shearing shed.  I sat on the ledge of a pen, peaceful and watching, my hands resting on the splintered planks beneath me. All was quiet and lazy in the afternoon. It was not a shearing day but later, weeks after the last tufts of wool had been swept to the corners and the dark patches of lanolin and oil etched into the absorbent wooden floor.

The sweating shearers and loud bang of the gates has gone, the jarring grind of the handpieces long faded into silence. The old wooden pens are stained with bird shit, blackened with the oil of the shearers’ hands and smooth with lanolin, brushed against by thousands of wool laden sheep.

The shafts of sunlight fall softly through the air from the old stuck windows, lighting the dust that spins like gold in the centre of the shed. The air is warm and smells of dust and old sweat, sheep and handpiece oil. I can hear the sheep outside, their baas rolling across the grass to one another, the rumble of the ground as they move as one.

The corrugated roof above is curved and painted red, an old photo of the highlands propped against a wall, faded with time and cracked with bird shit. This is my home. This warm air, those familiar sounds, the rustle of mice in the floor below. As the day wears on the afternoon sun fades, and so do I, smiling as I wake.

weekend sleep

Outside the wind roars in the trees, the erratic tap of stiff branches loud against the iron roof. I know that the rain is coming, my nose smells it in the cold air, the damp edge that slides under the doors and up under the glass windows. This old lockwood house bangs reassuringly, creaking and sagging as the wood contracts and expands, like a living, breathing being. The first drops begin to fall, their tiny pings reverberating across the roof as hundreds more join in. I close my eyes as the cacophony washes over me, and smile as I feel sleep start his slow creep down over my face.

Dreams flicker past in the early morning, the space where breath is warm and slow, movements languid, closed eyes hazy. My thoughts are spirals of smoke, dreams and colours from moments before disappearing, like water running into sand, irretrievable from the unconscious. Hunger bites gently at my stomach, my bladder nags quietly, but my eyes are too heavy with fatigue to answer. I roll over, face following the curve of my arm and then I am gone again, slipping softly below the down layers of consciousness, settling heavy at the dark bottom.

white rocks

When I was younger I did something bad. I think about it now and my stomach still swoops, clenched with guilt and embarrassment. I remember the rasp of the pencil against the rock, the satisfying shock of a dark line against the shell white of the virgin stone.

Then I remember the way it wouldn’t come off, not with a rubber, not with water, not with sandpaper, not with anything. I remember Mum so angry with me, her eyes like ice, glinting with cold fury, hot tears. Grandma crying, turning the stone over in her lined old hands, the papery skin of her thumb caressing the smooth curves, remembering their magnificence, before they were adorned with a clumsy smiling sun and lumbering low hills and flowers scrawled beneath.

Mum said that Pa gave Grandma that stone, and immediately in my eight-year-old mind I knew I had ruined everything. I had drawn my stupid, fleeting eight-year-old whims all over a poignant token of love that could never be replaced. In my mind there were no stones like that big smooth white one anywhere in the world. There was only this one, this one that Pa gave her before he died, and now could never give to Grandma again. Grandma and Mum both cried.

I hid. I was embarrassed and sick with guilt, I felt stupid beyond belief.

Fourteen years later I was driving with my friends along a stretch of highway on the West Coast, the windswept sea out to our right. The day was cold and grey, and dark pillows of clouds gathered over the far horizon.

Hokitika and its food were already far behind us, but our braided headbands still trailed from our foreheads, tiedyed skirts muddy around our ankles. The van was filled with the sound of Phil Collins, a blast from the past that we were all reliving ever since that Cadbury ad. As we rounded a corner the van began to slow, and we all craned our necks to see, as small formations by the roadside came into view.

The sandflies filled the van instantly as the door swung open, but I was frozen, held spellbound against the streaked glass.

They were rock cairns.

Sandwiched between a stretch of dirty highway and the iron grey sea, and flanked by a million sandflies.

Hundreds and hundreds of rock cairns, built from thousands and thousands of big, perfect, smooth, white rocks. I had heard about it and seen the photos, and there they were.

I had never realised they were white. So many.

My eyes were searching, trying to find one the same size, the same shape. That one! No there, that one’s better. There were hundreds, and they were all perfect. But as my voice crept its way back into my throat to speak we were whisked away again, the door swinging closed, trapping the sandflies alone with our muddy legs. The rock cairns were wrenched from my sight then and my attention was stolen by the hundreds of little black specks trying to feast on our exposed skin, but a seed had been planted. One day soon I’ll get back there, to that remote spot on the wild West Coast. And I will choose a stone just like the one Pa gave to Grandma, unadorned with childish stars and moons and hills and flowers scraped into it with lead, and I will give it to Grandma. Maybe she won’t remember, maybe she will. Maybe she’ll laugh, maybe she’ll cry. I know it won’t be the same one that Pa gave her, but maybe it could pretend to be.

And maybe someday, if I’m so lucky, my grandchildren might draw on it as well.

some summer photos

I haven’t written in a while. Too busy with summer, with new work. It makes me guilty when I think about it, when anyone mentions it. Oli says it with a quiet yearning that causes my eyes to flicker to the black mesh of the laptop case, tucked and forgotten underneath the wooden bowl full of keys.

And that guilt keeps me from writing. It makes me scared, afraid to open it up and clatter loudly on the black keys, as though stage fright dogs me even in quiet reflection. I think that nothing will just fly out from fingertips ready to be put on show. And because I think that, nothing does.

I wrote half a book in November. The problem is I have no more words. I have no more twists, and whether that stems from the lack of beaches and language barriers or from the lack of decent previous twists, I don’t know. I read more than I write now. Beautiful books, full of haunting personification and blissful description. But what good is inspiration if you don’t put it to use?

When I write I am in flow. Even now, while my writing is so inane and predictably daily my mind is away, thinking above, skipping a line below, all the while knitting and weaving the words together. Sometimes I don’t pause in my typing for what feels like hours.          Then the pause happens, and I almost lose it, like a receipt snatched away by the wind, grabbed at by a desperate outstretched hand.

And so the photos, photos of a busy summer and smiling sisters, heavy skies streaked with gold. I hope you all enjoy them.

the word thief

At the moment I am reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. It is an incredible story, so wonderfully written. The masterful way Zusak plays with words – switching verbs for nouns and slipping into German a little on each page – amazes me. So I thought I would attempt a little of his style, in the spirit of shared inspiration. It worked a little, but is quite tainted by my own. I hope you enjoy it, and if you haven’t read it already, go out and get The Book Thief!

Her mouth twisted towards the ground like a wrapper, cold and discarded in the dusk. He smiled in return, and then there were words exchanged. Snatched between them like a gust of wind.

‘What will you do with him.’ The question was flat and lifeless as it fell from her mouth, lacking both curiosity and anticipation. There was only the steady ebb of statement, the keen pitch of hurt at the end. Cold tears burnt her pink cheeks.

The sky above them was black and boiling, curdling at the yellow edges. Like soup.

His words were sharp as he spoke them into the ice, as though frozen by their exposed moments in the naked air. ‘His body will be buried.’ He kicked at the hard ground then, as though to illustrate the impossibility of such a task, the immense favour he was bestowing.

The alluded favour did little to shift the thick tension between them, and his arms fell to his sides. Limp and heavy. Dead in their filthy sleeves. Red shot through the sky to the east, almost hidden by the sumptuous curve of horizon. Circled around the two the dark trees were gathering darkness, pulling it around themselves like woolly water, as though to protect their ancient leaves from the fiery blasts, the violent rips that shook through their roots.

The girl began to cry, sinking towards the ground, pulled down by her loss. Her knees scraped against the dirty ground, blood stinging to the surface in a graze. It shone bright red against the spilt snow, pricks below her white skin.

The man’s eyes were like dough as they flickered between her face and the blood. He hoisted the boy’s body over his large shoulder like a rough sack of potatoes, surprised by how light it was.

A body is empty without the soul.

The sky shot burnt red again as he walked away from the girl, his heavy black boots crushing the bloodied snow underfoot. The rain began then, grey and straight, like discarded potato peelings.

Oświęcim

I wanted to write about something happy today. But the place that has haunted my thoughts the most since we passed through Poland is Auschwitz, and I feel as though I need to write about it, to talk about it.

We took a tiny mini bus out from Krakow, further than I thought. It was a cold day, and the bare forests that we drove through were misty, the trees ghostly and white, sparse skeletons. When we arrived outside the camp there were tour groups, busy and shouting, ready to be whipped past each heart wrenching sight. We tried to avoid them, ducking through the lines and making our way out into the camp.

Walking between the bare brick walls my skin prickled, as though the horror of that place was tangible, an a ominous hum beneath our feet. We entered one of the barracks, and instantly my eyes stung. Hundreds and hundreds of portraits lined the walls, each prisoner staring straight into the camera.

Those polish men. Their faces were so similar in their bareness. Head shaved, ears naked, thin flesh hanging from their cheekbones. Most were defiant, but some were half smiling, whether brave or oblivious I couldn’t figure out.

We were told about the women beaten to death with guns to save bullets, and the children tied together and stacked six high, their small bodies slender enough for one bullet to extinguish each of their lives. Countless pairs of shoes were piled in one of the rooms, tiny and scuffed, loved for so long until the day they were no longer needed. The gas chambers silently echoed the screams of the thousands who had died there, scratching at the walls, frantic and terrified and wishing for their loved ones.

There were piles and piles of hair, shaven from each of the women and bundled into sacks for the Nazis to sell for profit. Amongst the sea of matted brown there was one blonde lock, curling in at the bottom. I think that hit me the hardest. I realised that each one of those locks was a life. These people were plucked from their homes and their families, pulled apart and shipped off, on nightmare trains to this place straight from hell.

What was most disturbing was the cold efficiency. German cars, trains and infrastructure are still meticulously built like that – flawless and efficient. The train tracks brought the prisoners straight to the centre of the camp, and at the end of the line were the gas chambers.

There was a mountain of black suitcases, each tagged meticulously and loudly with numbers and names, so desperate were the owners to receive them back again. They never got them back. The women and children walked straight from the train down that long road, and on the icy cold day that we were there I could almost see them, young mothers and the elderly, all trying to comfort the children and stop them from crying, while the Nazis screamed at them to move and angry dogs bit the ankles of the slow.

I imagined the men who could work, the young and fit, forced to walk the other way into the freezing wind, watching their wives and children disappear into the fog never to see them again. Those men worked themselves to death. The beds in the windowless barracks were tiny and infested, and hundreds died there each day. The barracks at Auschwitz-II stretched on forever, the distant barbed wire fence hardly visible under the grey, windswept sky.

There were photos of the emaciated corpses, and the live ones, still only bones after four months of intense treatment after the liberation. The worst were the photos of a little girl, aged only two, curled on her bed with wise eyes that looked at the camera with all the age and anguish of the world. She and her sisters were victims of the experiments of Dr Mengele. Four girls stand in another, placid and waiting for the photo. They are naked, and every rib is visible, their pelvis and pubic bones jut out from their bodies, the pale skin stretched taut across the empty weight. They are ten years old.

Tears fell constantly from my cheeks for the four hours, each sight wrenching more from somewhere. The atrocities are unfathomable, and the sheer numbers of the people killed, degraded, tortured, starved and worked to death churning my stomach, that angry disgust that starts in the back of your teeth.

I couldn’t understand why. I don’t think I ever will. But the faces of those Polish men, and the eyes of that little girl, they will stay with me forever.

To the memory of the men, women, and children who fell victim to the Nazi genocide.         Here lie their ashes.                                                                                                              May their souls rest in peace.

the Lennon Wall

Amidst the browns and greys of the old streets of Prague, Czech Republic there lies a secret rebellion of colour. Well, maybe it isn’t so secret, but the twists and turns of the cobbled streets that lead to it make it feel as though no one knows about it, this deliciously clandestine wall, filled with paint and love and Beatles lyrics.

Years of youthful ideals, fearless love and sticky layers of paint all form the kaleidoscope of riotous colour. Love is the answer, all you need is love, love knows no distance or time. White doves and red hearts, peace symbols and outstretched hands. So hopeful, so sure.

We had Styrofoam cups of gluhwein nestled in our gloved hands, and the spicy warmth of the wine seemed to mix somehow with all those colours from the wall, making the cool breezy day suddenly intoxicating and vibrant. I felt like anything was possible, staring up at those bold words.

The Lennon Wall has been a place of freedom and positive expression for decades in Prague, a message of hope and love in the centre of a stricken city, created by rebellious artists, students, intellectuals. It has been painted over several times by the authorities, but within a day or two the messages reappear, and soon the wall is covered once more, a fantastic illustration of the resilience of the human spirit.

Never have I felt so at one with those around me as I did on that day, holding my gluhwein beneath that vivid expanse of bravery and love. I wished that I had a paintbrush too.