By Grace Costigan
Inspired by her Blue Mountains surroundings, HSC English dux Grace Costigan submitted a short fiction. Read two short extracts here.
St Columba’s Grace Costigan came first in English extension 2.Credit: Janie Barrett
“I’d rather sail away. Like a swan that’s here and gone”
El Cóndor Pasa (If I could), Simon and Garfunkel
In Claude’s backyard there is a spotted fig tree.
The trunk is mantled in spirals of scrunched creases which wobble with each puff of wind.
In out. Out in.
Each morning, Claude rests on his chair beneath the canopy. His thoughts sway as the tree offers up a ballet, the branches synchronised by the melodic throb of rain on the corrugated roofing. Today, dawn is over and the clouds have scraped any sunlight from his world, but Claude doesn’t notice this swathe of gloom.
For when he is beneath his fig tree, it is just him and his world and me.
His world of waning moons, Simon and Garfunkel, percolated coffee, wind-chimes, aged cheddar.
Just. Claude.
From an outsider’s point of view, I understand how he must look like the grumpy senior citizen who owns a crusty white dog and spends his days alone on the front porch ready to yell at the schoolkids who might step on his lawn.
But he doesn’t. Because he’s Claude.
I am unable to recall when my Claude morphed into this man of solitude. It would be untruthful to say that his state of misery is his fault. It was simply that the thread which divided mornings and evenings – dreams and memories – nightmares and realities – past and present – became a milky cocktail.
Locked in the vacuum. Sucked in. Never let out.
Simply a churned pina colada. But bitter.
Somewhere along the way, grief took the limelight. Snapping the strings of his marionette, Claude’s beautiful brain was left split. in. two.
Claude and the fig tree and the rain understand each other, for there is no need to explain the aching which has buried itself within his mind.
No need to speak.
No need to hear the ugly truth.
That I am gone.
Of course, it took me a while, but somewhere along the way I came to accept the fact that the rain and the fig tree are Claude’s new confidantes. Once, the pain was heavy for I was a slice of life’s beauty which had wrapped itself around Claude’s finger like a child’s pudgy hand and their mother’s soft thumb.
I sought comfort and he protected me.
He sought kindness and I loved.
Not merely a place of wonder on the map of his world, I was his universe.
The force which drew it all together. His person.
I am the only one who can hear grief playing its tune in his mind, orchestrating and synthesising melodies of reminiscence.
Darkness, my old friend, is talking with him once again.
Claude is its victim.
_____________________________________________________________________
“Oh Cecilia I’m down on my knees, I’m begging you please to come home”
Cecilia, Simon and Garfunkel.
Rain. Unexpected. Needed.
I was a dancing child, but I resembled a middle-aged footy player following the grand final victory – only I was twenty years too young and I didn’t need alcohol to electrify my body with happiness.
Only life and nature and Cecilia. I’d found that they had that effect.
We hadn’t made it to the mainland yet, as I had allowed myself to bask in the delicious rain. It was seductive and tantalising and it had been a long time coming. I liked this rain, I actually liked it a lot, more then I let on of course, for Cecilia and I had always associated dreary weather with teen goths flaked with piercings and dark slits for eyes. Circa The Cure’s Disintegration days – nothing but moping and whingeing.
But none of that was true in those moments.
For I liked life and I loved Cecilia and that is all I knew.
We’d moved camp from beneath a run-down bridge to the caravan park further north, where the phone reception was claimed to be the best in Tassie, the locally brewed beer dubbed as “epiphanic”, a road to Damascus moment, your life changed forever. It was known as the dodgy part of Burnie, but it was cheap and we knew to have doors locked before ten. We were the youngest there by a good fifty years and we’d truly enriched the lives of the oldies in the bingo room by the time they’d called it stumps at seven pm. Little bit too much rummy and one too many boogies to Neil Diamond.
The day had been slow and we’d filled its holes with lazing and lovemaking until hunger awoke us. Cecilia voted for oysters and I craved Indian, and while the usual argument had been brewing about whose choice it was that night, Mum’s just let her decide, you’ll never win this one, chorused in my mind. So, we settled on the bowlo – Cecilia could get the fisherman’s basket and I could indulge in the weekly Chinese special.
As though a big smear of Vaseline has been rubbed into the fabrics of the earth, in winter at dusk the sun’s light warps the world into slimy spectacles. It’s an awkward time of the evening, when the light is no longer fully there but the darkness is still just waking up. Before that night with Cecilia, I associated dusk with the time of the day when my little sister would get sluggish before running rampant with overtiredness; when the neighbours would bring the bins in, shut the venetians on the world and settle down in front of last night’s re-run of Neighbours with some cheese and bickies.
But now, no matter the time of year, I know dusk as the time of day which lets the sunshine lead you on a deceptive path into the unknown – one which promises to stay by your side until it too gets tired and decides to turn in for the night. Unlike dawn which colours the day, dusk simply strips all of life’s vibrancy.
On that winter night with Cecilia, we were guided by the moon. It started with us, it followed us, and then, it left with us too.
Carried Cecilia.
It didn’t seem right back then and it doesn’t really add up now either, how the thin toe-nail clipping of the moon could blend my past and present into one. On that night, its delicate light drew the rain clouds together. Terry from Bingo instructed us that they are known as nimbostratus; “pregnant rain clouds which, when they burst, leave our sky in a layer of charcoal.”
Like drops on a cold glass of milk, the rain crystallised on the street lights. Their low-hanging orbs lapping up the grey whiskers of my cigarette smoke and the nearby shriek of pokies’ jingles. Down the wet bitumen which shone like liquorice, we drove.
Cecilia in the passenger seat. Me in the driver’s. The Landie, our carriage.
Scared children at nighttime understand the monsters which lurk in the great hole of blackness. The figures who loom in the corners; hiding, harming, hurting.
Not bingo-cheating, Neil Diamond-swaying people of kindness.
But road-swerving, drink-driving people of cruelty.
That night, I watched the girl as I held her dying body in the Landie’s wreck.
I watched her in those beautiful lights.
Cradled her like a baby to my chest.
Stained with her jam-like blood.