Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 (25 page)

Forgive my frankness. It's just the way I'm wired.

You say Valentines. I think massacre.

I hand over the potion. She gives up her voice.

Now, who got the best deal, my wise children?

I'd almost feel sorry for her

if she wasn't so painfully stupid.

{The Fourth Chorus}

Oh sister, little lost note,

what have you done?

Why let the witch clip your tongue

from your throat?

We've sung three ships down

with our keening, but you're deaf

to all love save his.

Remember your troth

little lost love – 

it's marry or salt tears to ocean

delicate bone to sea lace and foam.

Oh sister, pinned to the ground

by your infant legs,

dancing in blood for your life – 

he calls you dumb foundling.

Take warning, lost note,

that's no name for a wife.

{The Prince's Little Foundling}

She arrived with a change in the weather,

my pretty dumb foundling,

problems with her feet

and no voice to even state her name.

The ideal listener,

in love with me, of course,

but what can I do?

Friends with benefits, sure,

but I want a partner

with some snap and sizzle,

standing equal and firm.

Adoration has a strictly limited season.

One more kiss, little mute,

my sweet dumb foundling,

one more turn round that dance floor.

Then I'll let you down gently.

It's not you, it's me,

too young, too soon, too much,

but best friends on Facebook, oh yes,

your number on speed dial,

your photo on my phone – 

until the contract's expired.

Adoration has a strictly limited season.

{The Supplicants}

Here come the fishtailed five,

lamenting the loony lovelorn one,

the singing sisters,

all doleful minor chords today.

And what can I do for you, my little aquatic sprites?

It looks as though you're not quite the full complement?

A sextet reduced to a quin – stop thrashing your tails,

I know what you want. There'll be a cost,

and no guarantees.

Minutes later I'm left with five kilos of hair

and they've got the spell to set her free – 

if she consents.

Oh my wise children,

you
know she'll not do it.

Martyr herself. Tick.

Die for love. Tick.

Sacrifice herself on the glossy double-spread

of honeymoon tips for newlyweds? Tick.

Kill for life?

Not on your red-heart helium balloon.

Not even for the keening quintet,

now quite bald.

{The Wedding Night}

I'm good as dead and he doesn't even know.

They're at it again. I'd scream at them – 

Break it up, have a rest, get some sleep
 – 

but I gave away my voice.

I gave it all away for what? My ear pressed

to the wall, hearing her show-off moans,

his sly love-whispers, the lip-suck and swell of them,

poisoning my air. I've been so stupid.

I flee the loving noise,

each step a knife-thrust. I may as well die, I think

when I see my sisters. I'd laugh at their egg-heads

shining in the moonlight, but my heart is shattered

and my life ebbing out with the night.

I can't even say goodbye but they're all talking at once.

They've been to the witch, they sold their hair – 

for me? For a knife. Sharpened with spite,

honed on hate. I'm to plunge it deep,

right through his heart, then let his blood

flow on my feet. I take the blade.

With each step it grows heavier.

They're sleeping now, spent.

It should be my head on his shoulder,

my hair shawling his chest,

my legs wrapped around his.

Instead I'm here with death in my hands

and dogging my steps.

What is love? My sisters' hair? My voice?

The way he holds her?

I can't strike. Look,

dreams move under his eyelids.

I tiptoe out, knife in hand,

to wait for the sun to rise on my last morning.

{The Fifth Chorus}

Bald for no reason

we sulk in the shallows,

scalps prickled with cold.

There's always one sister – 

the baby, the spoilt one – 

who refuses to play

except by her rules.

Her choice, after all.

Why then do we bicker?

Why do we pick at our tails,

flicking azure blue scales

into the air?

Are legs so in fashion?

We don't want them,

but our voices waver.

We're disconsolate, quarrelsome

and sadly out of tune.

Her stumbling world – 

impossibly – seems

grand and postcard-bright.

{The Prince on Love}

I'm not the main player – 

although indispensable – 

what I don't do

moves the story inexorably on.

But if I could have your attention

I'd like to talk about love.

How it's not always convenient – 

you don't make an appointment,

you don't say, not this week, thanks,

I'm busy. Love knocks you off your feet,

leaves you winded, lost – or found.

Steals up and kidnaps you.

It can happen at the wrong time

to the wrong people.

It doesn't come with a lifetime guarantee.

I fell for a secondary character – 

it was written in my stars.

Am I a villain?

More the callow ingénue

saying the lines

love told me to.

{The Mermaid's Last Word}

Every little girl

wants to be a mermaid.

See how they flip and flop

in the swimming pools,

feet together until they forget,

dolphin-kicking down at the shallow end.

I longed to be a girl.

What was between those legs,

I wondered, what power?

Don't think the story ends with me

waiting for death like a fish on a hook.

I'd bargained once – I could do it again.

It's not all about men. I knew what I'd miss;

wiggling my toes in the sand

knee-hi striped socks

how tall I looked in heels

and the way boots make me swagger.

I knew what I wanted – my legs

wrapped around another's,

my hair on his chest, my name on his breath.

I worked out my time with the seasnakes,

grew fond of the toads and the witch.

Now I'm at Sea World – the seal girl – 

feeding them fish from my mouth.

I'm dating the trainer – the one

with the mermaid tattoo – not my idea.

We're learning the tango.

He doesn't talk much but has eloquent eyes.

When we kiss, I stand on tiptoe,

tasting the ocean

and the flight-filled sky.

{The Witch's Postscript}

I know you think I'm getting soft

but I always liked her. She knew what she wanted

and exactly how far she'd go.

Wasn't going to settle for siren songs

on a cold damp rock, all that endless

brushing of hair. I did the others a favour – 

knots every hint of a breeze

and split ends from the salt.

I always loathed the ending that boy

put on the story – silly Hans,

a sentimentalist, of course.

The daughters of the air

three hundred years of good deeds

the tears of sorrow and extra days

for a wicked child – please!

Better she stands on a diving board,

fish between her teeth,

loved by the crowd, the seals

and their trainer. He paints her toenails,

rubs her feet. What better ending than this?

Look at them, practising the tango,

how he dips her and lifts,

how her legs slide

between his.

Then the kiss.

AFTERWORD

I discovered feminist poetry in my teens. In Brisbane in the late seventies, this was no small achievement. There was no feminist or gay and lesbian bookshop in Brisbane. There was no www.amazon.com or any other internet resource. Bjelke Peterson was the premier and nearly everyone I knew risked jail at various public protests.

The poets who congregated in our second-hand bookshop were, for the most part, male. I grew up in a household that read and recited poetry – W. B. Yeats, John Donne, Ernest Dowson and Robert Browning. My mother and I loved Judith Wright and Gwen Harwood. Later I read the Mersey River poets, Adrian Henri and Roger McGough, loving their pop culture references thrown so irreverently into what I had regarded as a rarefied art form.

The anthology
No More Masks: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets
, edited by Florence Howe, was electrifying. I can still feel the thick, yellowed paper under my fingers and how I held my breath at each turned page. Here were voices I had never before heard. The poems were immediate, urgent and revolutionary. They were playful and sexy. They simmered with angry energy. They were fearless. They were mine.

This is a long way from ‘The Little Mermaid', sacrificing her identity for love, and then sacrificing it all over again to conform to a patriarchal religious ideology and gain an immortal soul! Or is it?

Second-wave feminism challenged women to re-vision fairytales. Even poets such as Anne Sexton, who never identified as a feminist but was nonetheless a bold fore- mother of the next generation, put her own inimitable spin on the tales in
Transformations
, her cackling, streetwise witch-voice rocketing the stories into the twentieth century. She used the fairy stories to further her own personal mythology – a mythology with a foundation in mental illness, therapy and a dark family history undercut by Sexton's sly, black humour.

I knew from the outset that I wanted to write a poetry sequence for this project. I wanted to be able to give more than the central character a voice and I wanted the poems book-ended by the witch-storyteller. ‘The Little Mermaid' appealed to me because, while the mermaid appears on first reading passive, she's actually very brave. After all, she alone of her five siblings falls in love with the world above the sea. She's an intrepid explorer. Sure, there's the prince – but isn't he just part of that great tug of the unknown? In our contemporary world she'd be the one falling in love with a Masai warrior, Indian swami or an eco-activist living a life of subsistence. We shake our heads at their folly, but marvel at the optimism and sense of destiny that leads to such adventures. It will end in tears, we say wisely, and it does of course. But after the tears have been mopped up, a richer, less predicted life remains.

Could I find this life for my little mermaid? I was hampered by Hans Christian Andersen. Fortunately, I wasn't also influenced by Disney, having escaped ever seeing the Disney version, by luck rather than intent. However, Hans Christian Andersen was a problem. His Little Mermaid was courageous, certainly. She defies her grandmother and her siblings to visit the witch. She braves the sea serpents and the line of toads that guard the witch's watery residence. She gives away her tail and her voice with scarcely a backward glance, subjecting herself to constant agony and stripping herself of one of her best assets – mermaids sing siren songs. She rescues the prince only to watch him fall in love with the girl he believes rescued him from the shipwreck. She mutely worships him, sleeping like a cat at his feet. She suffers him saying that if it wasn't for this other girl, he'd marry her. Her sisters bargain for her life but she refuses to murder him and save herself. She'd rather die.

Hans Christian Andersen's version ends with an odd coda, bringing in the mysterious daughters of the air who can prevent the little mermaid becoming nothing but sea foam. They can give her a chance to earn an immortal soul.

This was my stumbling block. I didn't want the daughters of air in my take on ‘The Little Mermaid'. I didn't like them or what they stood for. They made my little mermaid a namby-pamby goody-goody two-shoes. Even though she'd give up everything for love, I wanted my little mermaid to be worthy of the poets who had influenced me so much with their fierce forgings of identity in
No More Masks
.

My answer was in what I'd just called her. Goody-goody two-shoes. What was a flippy tail compared to the joy of shoes? Purple stompy boots for winter, teetering in your first high heels, slipping on strappy sandals on a warm day in summer – would my girl give up all that? I remembered shoes I'd loved – some fringed suede boots I'd worn going out with a motorcycle-lover, a pair of T-bar high heels that made me feel so French, and way back, my first heeled sandals, white leather with a flower, bought for me by my father. Shoes or immortal soul? No contest.

From there it was plain sailing – forgive the pun. I knew she'd have to go back to the witch, but hey, the witch was on her side. I knew the sisters would lament, but that's what sisters are for. I'd get my girl a job and give her a life – not the life she would have chosen initially, but richer, unpredicted. My Little Mermaid stands firmly on her own two feet.

M
rs Carlyle has given us all exercise books and said we are going to try to keep a journal this term. This is mine. She says it's better if we don't feel self-conscious so we don't have to put our names on the journals. They will be anonymous. She says she would just like to read them.

Mrs Carlyle has two budgies, a boy and a girl, and they have built a nest. If they have baby budgies and if I'm allowed she will give me one. You have to wait until they're old enough to leave the nest before you can take them away from their parents because they need special looking after. In my mind I can picture this. The babies would live in a soft little nest inside the milk carton Mrs Carlyle has put inside their cage as a nesting box.

The nest for the budgies is soft because I think the mother bird pulls some feathers out of her chest to put inside. This seems cruel but Mrs Carlyle says she put other soft things in the cage and the mother budgie didn't want any of them. She is using instinct. The babies would all be snuggled up inside. If she will give one to me, I would like a girl budgie. I think I would name her Alicia. When I think about teaching her how to say her name I can nearly hear it. I have to wait, Mrs Carlyle says, because she's not sure her budgie is even going to lay eggs yet. She says not to tell the other kids because they would get jealous. After she says this, when I walk back into class and down to my desk, I feel my skin buzzing like someone has stroked it. I hope Alicia is blue.

My mum says do you like him? Shane I mean. She has on her nice earrings. He's OK, I say. Later on when Shane comes over, Mum is in the kitchen cooking dinner. She's made homemade lasagne and now she's heating up oil in the deep saucepan. She calls to Shane, you haven't lived till you've had my home-cooked chips. I'm famous for them. Isn't that right Tyler? My home-cooked chips?

Once I asked if I could get some money to go and buy a hamburger and she suddenly jumped up really angry and said why do you need a crap takeaway hamburger? I can make you a much better hamburger here at home. She got mince out and made a hamburger in the frypan with onions. It took forever. Finally she gave it to me with two pieces of bread holding it all together. Isn't that better than Maccas? she kept asking. Isn't it? Answer me.

Now I just say yes. Mrs Carlyle told us that when you are training your dog you need to say the same thing over and over until the dog gets it. He wants to do the right thing, he just doesn't know at first. She says it's the same with training a bird to talk, you have to say the same thing again and again so they learn. That's true and maybe it's true for people too.

I'm starving, says Shane, and looks over at me with a smile. He is just out of the shower and there are comb marks in his hair. He says you wanna change channels? and leans over to give me the remote. You have to press the button really hard to make it change channels now because it's wearing out. So I change it over to Simpsons.

What grade are you in? he says, and I tell him grade six, Mrs Carlyle's class. Six C. She comes in and says how are you this morning my treasures? My lovely Six Cs. I've missed you!

I don't tell Shane this. Grade six, he repeats. When Homer and Marge talk to each other their whole heads move to ask a question and then answer but when Shane talks to me just his eyes move sideways, his head stays watching TV.

He says I bet you've got a boyfriend. I can hear my mum clattering oven trays in the kitchen. On the TV Bart is climbing up into his tree house. He can go really fast, much faster than I could in real life. Just a few steps and he's there. But I always like to see the inside of his tree house. I wish I had one. And I don't want a boyfriend. I want the set of 72 Derwents.

They are in a tin that opens out with all the sharp points of the pencils in order and in every colour you could ever think of using. Georgia has some at school and even when you sharpen them they feel special, the wood is so soft and it peels back to leave the pencil good as new. My grandma asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I took her to the shop where they are. The art supply shop smells so beautiful inside, all clean new pencils and paper and brushes. She had a good look at them. For your colouring in? she said. I felt happy when we walked out again, imagining. They have names soft as feathers. Pale Mint. Sea Green. Grey Green. French Grey. Rose Pink. Cloud Blue. Iced Blue. Kingfisher Blue. Prussian Blue. Indigo. Sometimes just when I am walking along the names come into my head like a rhyme in time with my footsteps.

I will put them into my denim pencil case and only take a few at a time to school, but I will invite Georgia over to my house and open up the whole tin so we can do drawing and colouring in together on the table on the weekend. Mrs Carlyle has a special Stanley knife and she could scrape some of the paint off the end so I could write my name on each one. On the tin is a picture of someone's sketch they have done of an old stone bridge going over a rocky creek. It is a very good drawing and it looks like a picture from the old set of encyclopaedias in the library. When I go in there Mrs Bradbury says it's good to see someone still uses the reference section Tyler. I think she means the lovely way the books smell, which is true, I love that too.

You have got a boyfriend, haven't you? says Shane. I can tell. Cause you're blushing.

Bart and Milhouse are in Bart's tree house and they're talking about staying out there the night. I'm watching and I know that in a few seconds it will be night and you will see the moon and they will get scared.

In cartoons time passes really fast and sudden. Also, things happen that aren't true. Like a cat will be running along and will go through the wall and there will be an exactly cat-shaped hole left behind in the wall. Mum's old boyfriend Garry threw a bottle at the wall once and it didn't leave a shape like that it just smashed.

Bart and Milhouse are still in the tree house but it's night and there are big shadows that scare them. They race down the rope ladder screaming. When they scream on the Simpsons their mouths open way up and their little tongues come out and wriggle and you can see their tonsils. That's meant to be funny, and it must be because Shane laughs. Bart runs back into his room and hides in his bed. I like Lisa but she's not in this one.

I'm not blushing, I say to Shane. Sure looks like it to me, he says. What do you get up to with that boyfriend of yours? See, you're not looking at me, so I know it's true.

I try to think if I've ever seen a Simpsons where a human goes running through a wall and leaves a person-shaped hole.

Wait till you taste these chips, calls my mum.

Shane is under my mum's Subaru in the driveway. What a shitheap, he says. I ask him what he's fixing up and he says the carby. He's out there for a long time even when Mum tells him to come inside and have dinner, which is just pasta tonight. It is those little shell ones. I get a clean one onto the side of my plate and imagine it is something in the sea where an animal lives. Ellie is working tonight at Subway. Shane and my mum argue outside about the car and something in the garage gets knocked over. Whatever you've taken out you'd better put back in because I need it tomorrow says Mum, and Shane says look it's just not that simple. I could curl up inside this soft shell and it would be like a hammock in there, all warm. That's all I want to write for today.

If Georgia came over to my house we could make hot Milo and some of that popcorn that you cook in the microwave. She told me she was on camp once and they had toasted marshmallows on sticks on the fire. We could do them under the griller. We have a packet of wooden skewers. We could draw horses and do the colouring in and then we could watch
Saddle Club
and if she wanted we could put on some of Mum's nail polish. Even just do our homework together. I always do my homework when I come home from school. Mum says I sure didn't get that gene off her. I like to sketch but Mum says that's not going to impress the teachers and she wasn't still paying off a colour printer and a computer with internet so I could just do drawings.

First there is
Home and Away
then
Deal or No Deal
. If Georgia came over we could go into my room and Mum wouldn't keep knocking and asking me what I was doing because when you have a friend over that explains it.

And if Shane came over he would leave us alone I hope.

OK goodbye for now.

Mrs Carlyle said who's been writing things in their diary and nobody put up their hands so I kept mine down too, just in time. Someone said there's nothing to write about and Mrs Carlyle said why not write about something that happened to you when you were little, like learning to ride a bike, or Christmas, or a favourite toy.

I have a doll that my Aunty Jacinta gave me for Christmas two years ago when we went to their place in the country. The doll has a long dress and hidden under the dress instead of feet is another doll and you can pull it all inside-out. She is first of all like Cinderella when she was dressed in patchy clothes, and when you pull the dress over the other side has Cinderella in her ball gown and she has a crown on her head. The whole doll is knitted. When my mum saw it she laughed. My older brother Zac had come with us for Christmas and she rolled her eyes at him and nudged him and said see, told you it would be like the Waltons, but Zac just said who are the Waltons? and he wouldn't look at her. I don't know Zac very well because he has lived with another family since before I was born. There's just been Ellie and me even though Mum had three other children before us, Dylan, Zac and Tegan. Anyway Zac was there and it felt strange because the cousins were all like new kids at a strange school, not talking, and my mum said I had so many dolls at home already I was just getting spoiled, and to say thank you to Aunty Jacinta for the homemade one.