The other side of the world
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 26: Stories for Today
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Sherryl Clark
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Tell me a story, the boy said every night. So I did. Every night, a different story. Fairytales, Dr Seuss, favourite picture books. But always he wanted more, as if something was missing. I wouldn't tell him the old stories. The ones that keep you awake in the dark.
THE BACK LAWN is a rectangle of green. I clean the spade, sand the handle, sharpen the blade. I choose a spot in the far corner, thump the spade down, feel the blade bite. The ground is harder than I thought – we haven't had much rain lately. I lift the turf, lay it aside in small patches, widen the square of plain dirt.
‘What are you doing?'
My wife of twenty-three years has crept up behind me in her red velvet slippers. I wipe sweat from my forehead.
‘I'm digging a hole.'
‘What for?'
She eyes the dirt, the marred surface of her perfectly mowed lawn. We spent last weekend planting a neat border of mondo grass. Now her garden looks like a gaudy beach umbrella with a brown fringe.
‘I thought I might put in a pond.'
‘Here?'
‘Why not?'
There are lots of things I could say to convince her. I could talk about rocks, pond plants, ground covers, tiny darting goldfish.
‘I suppose...'
She waits and watches.
‘It's getting a bit hot. I'll do some more later.'
I put down the spade and walk inside to get a glass of water. When she has gone, I return and carefully dig up some more grass. After about an hour, I stop. I load the grass clods into a wheelbarrow and put them in the compost.
The lawn now has a neat rectangle of dirt etched into it. It seems about the right size to me.
AT DINNER, MY wife seems edgy. She fiddles with her wine glass, turns the music up and down, spreads crumbs on the table and then sweeps them up with her hand. Her rings glint in the candlelight.
EVERY SUNDAY I visit my mother. She is in a rest home, one of those almost luxurious residences with thick carpet and lined curtains and central heating to disguise the fact that they are prisons.
My mother is not allowed outside. Not even into the back garden. Once, she climbed the gum tree beside the fence and escaped. They found her in Myer, putting on lipstick from the sample display. Four colours at once, maybe more if they hadn't stopped her. They laughed and said how ‘sprightly' she was. Her carers were hoping I wouldn't sue, and I didn't.
Every Sunday, I sit beside my mother and she asks, ‘Who are you?'
I am tempted to say, ‘I don't know. Who do you think I am?' But I don't. I say, ‘I am your son, Charles.'
‘I don't have a son,' she says. ‘I'm not married. How can I have a son? That would be a sin.'
Sometimes I talk to her about my family, but she doesn't remember them either. She lives in the past somewhere, a place that holds sharp moments, people who are long since dead but still vividly alive to her.
So mostly I listen. I listen to other visitors trying to get their mothers and fathers to talk to them. It seems sad that all those words go to waste.