Reflections
An award-winning short story
Danielle de Valera
Copyright Danielle de Valera 2015
Reflections
A condensed version of this story entitled “A Pink Rosebush and a Piece of Lattice” won the Ed Gaskell Award and was published in Age Matters, Lismore City Council, 2002.
Cover by C S McClellan
All rights reserved. No part may be reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
If you would like to do any of the above, please seek permission first by contacting the author at
[email protected] ISBN 978-0-9942745-1-9
Published in the United States by Old Tiger Books.
First published in Australia in Age Matters, Lismore City Council 2002.
My thanks to EdenPics for allowing me to use photograph no. 003005: Sunset on a pond with reflections ...Switzerland, St Gallen, Dreilinden. More of their nature photos can be found at https://www.edenpics.com
Table of Contents
Story start
Halfway
Last scene
More stories in this series
About the author
Other works by this author
Reflections
I HEAR THEM, YOU UNDERSTAND. And yet I don’t hear them. There’s no point in listening; it’s the same thing every time.
“Good morning, Mr Lawson, and how are we today?”
Answering these girls is pointless. They aren’t really asking you a question—it’s a greeting, something to say. People have to say something to each other when they’re strangers.
I drink my cup of tea in silence and give thanks for small mercies. It tastes like dishwater but at least it comes. It’s something you can rely on.
The sun’s out today, so we get to sit in the garden between morning tea and lunch time. The trees here are very beautiful and, though I can‘t see much any more, I can tell there are lots of brightly coloured flowers in the garden.
“It makes the place look so cheerful,” Matron says. But of course you can’t pick them. When I had my own place, I always grew flowers as well as vegetables, always liked to have cut flowers in the house.
The painters are here again. Seems they’re always painting this building.
“‘Scuse us,” they say as they carry their ladders past me.
I don’t answer them.
“Wonder what he’s thinking,” says the dark haired one, the one who reminds me of my daughter.
“Prob’ly nothing at all,” the other one says. Coarser. Fairer. “You know what they’re like at that age.”
Let me tell you, BoyO, you won’t get to my age. If you do, you’ll be dotty. Like Iris, who wanders the hallways, crying, “Don’t Daddy, don’t!” Or you’ll be drooling like old Colonel Henry, who commanded an entire regiment in the Second World War. How are the mighty fallen, And the weapons of war perished.
Then there’s Mrs Everton, who thinks she’s in the hotel her husband used to take her to when they were courting.
“It’s a beautiful place, Mr Lawson,” she says to me. “The gardener does a wonderful job. I think I’ll have my wedding reception here.”
“You do that, Mrs Everton,” I say. Why burst her bubble?
Some days, though, I think something gets through to her. Those days she looks upset and spends her day staring out the window. When the nurses ask, “Wouldn’t you like to watch TV?” she waves them away.
Everyone’s mad here but me.
Maisie thinks her children are going to come and take her home. I’ve never seen them, not in seven years. She packs to go home at least twice a week. I sit in my chair by the window and watch her, when I’m not watching the birds. There’s nothing anyone can do. She sits on the bed, fully dressed. Waiting for them.
When the sandwiches are brought round at five o’clock and the nurses make her take off her brave little hat with the pansies, and swallow a Valium and change into her nightdress, she seems to resign herself.
“They must’ve been held up,” she says to me. “But I’ll keep my port packed. That way I’ll be all ready if they come early tomorrow.”
They might sound a bit pathetic, these women I share the place with, but they’re still standing, as Elton John said in one of his songs.
The matron wanted to put me on antidepressants the other day. The GP, who gets paid for walking past twenty people in forty minutes, twice a week, would’ve written out a script on the spot if I hadn’t flatly refused just as the official visitor happened to be walking by. That put paid to the antidepressants. What’s the point in taking poison just because you see things as they are? Perhaps I’ll take them next year. Or the year after that. As Star once said, it’s good to keep something up your sleeve for the really tough times.
Last night I dreamed of my Uncle Arthur. I only saw him once, when we visited the orchard outside Stanthorpe, but I remember him well. Poor coot, he never got over his wife Daphne leaving him, died in some mental hospital. That’s what living in the country can do to you. I ran away from the dairy farm as soon as I turned seventeen. Joined the merchant navy, changed my name. Educated myself at night school, became a chemist. The rest, as they say, is history.
FRIDAY AFTERNOON. THE CLOCK HANGS ON THE WALL. The visitors sit dejected, tired of searching for something to say. In the Activities Room, the Friday afternoon community singing starts up.
“By the light, [By the light, By the light],
Of the silvery moon, [Of the silvery moon],
I want to spoon, [I want to spoon],
To my honey I’ll croon love’s tune ...”
“Why don’t you come? It’ll do you good,” the little nurse’s aide named Cinnamon says to me. Surely that can’t be her real name. For a second, I’m tempted to go, just to see her smile. But I prefer to go to North Beach.
North Beach, in the summer of 1933 ... I was thirteen. Sap rising.
Every Sunday the launch Kelvin makes two trips from Mullumbimby to Brunswick Heads and back. It moors at the boatshed in the river, just round from the Heads.
We race over the gangplank, my brothers and I, and tear along the path through the bush to the beach. Behind us, Father carries the baby, and Mother and Aunt Ellie carry the picnic baskets.
Ah, the ocean! It’s like magic after being on the dairy farm all week.
We stand on the sand near the lifesavers’ tower and tear off the clothes we’ve got on over our bathing costumes. I’m always the last one in, but I don’t care. I don’t go far out. I just splash around near the shore and, when I’m tired of that, I walk along the beach, collecting seashells in my sun hat.
Mother and Aunt Ellie sit under a she oak, wearing large hats tied with scarves, and never ever go in the water. I stay away from them. They’ll only want me to help them put out the food for the picnic.
“Boys should learn these things, too, Charlie,” unmarried Aunt Ellie says at least twice a week.
I don’t listen. Everyone knows preparing food is woman’s work.
When the whistle sounds, we’ve got fifteen minutes to gather our things and get back to the boat. I hate having to leave; I want to stay here for the rest of my life. I’ll change my last name from Doyle to Durberville, grow my hair right down to my shoulders and, when I grow up, men who see me will be blinded by my beauty.
But I always end up catching the boat back with my family.
“Honey moon, [Honey moon, Honey moon],
Keep a-shining in June, [Shin-ing in June] ...”
Sometimes, though, especially lately, I think I might rearrange that memory. Why do I have to go back and grow up on a dairy farm? I want to paint.
I’m good at it. In my new improved memory, I build a cabin behind the dunes when I’m sixteen . I build it out of bits of old timber washed up on the beach, swim naked in the river every morning, fall asleep to the sound of the sea.
I buy groceries at Brunswick Heads, wading across the river at low tide. And I paint. The walls of the cabin are covered with my paintings. When I’m eighteen, a handsome art dealer down from Brisbane on a holiday falls in love with me and takes me back to the city with him. I become famous and give art exhibitions. What a glamorous life we lead!
But I can never hold on to that fantasy. Always it blurs and starts to fragment. What about when it’s dark—what about money? Reason comes crashing in like the sea in a cyclone, and I have to catch the boat back, after all.
Some things you just can’t change.
“Your silv’ry beams
Will bring love’s dreams,
We’ll be cuddlin’ soon,
By the silvery moon. [The ... sil-v’ry ... moon ...]”
The sandwiches are here so it must be five o’clock. I don’t mind. Tonight, after lights out, I’ll go to Mr and Mrs Reading’s house with my wife. We looked after their house for our honeymoon, Angela and I, in 1944. Three days, we had. That was all the leave I could get.
It was a wooden cottage with lattice on the verandas and no power. At night, we lit hurricane lamps, geckos fell from the rafters into our soup and the scent of the eucalypts mingled with the smell of the sea. There were spiders in the outhouse and sometimes snakes. But Angela wasn’t afraid of anything. She could ride and shoot and swim. Swim. She used to go so far out on that bodyboard she could barely carry that I’d get frightened, just watching her.
I got my daughter Thea to take me back to North Beach in 1977. We drove to the spot in her big American car. There was nothing there. Only the bush and the new rock walls, and the sea breaking.
The cottage, the boatshed, the lifesavers’ tower—gone, as if they’d never existed.
I searched the spot where the cottage had been but all I found was a small piece of lattice.
TIME ROLLS OVER US LIKE THE OCEAN, the painters are here again. The jacarandas in the garden blaze with colour. That’s all they are to me now; just patches of colour. A breeze shakes the branches. I put out my hand and, like a miracle, one flower lands in my palm.
People think jacarandas have no scent. Ah, but they do: a fine light fragrance that makes your heart thud strangely in your chest.
I hold the flower tight and close my eyes as the painters go by, carrying their ladders. It’s such a beautiful morning that I go to North Beach with Angela. We walk up the beach to the New Brighton store and send postcards to all our friends. Wish You Were Here. Of course we don’t, but sending the postcards is fun.
In the evening, after dinner, we stand on the dunes and try to spot the troopships passing by out at sea. Hard to do because they’re all blacked out. I hold Angela’s hand and stand on the dunes with the sea wind blowing her long white nightdress against her legs.
There! We see the dark shape of a ship going north out there on the horizon. For a second, someone moves a blackout curtain in one of the landside cabins, and light spills from the porthole. We try to imagine what it must be like to go on a cruise to Europe, like people used to do before the war. Angela and I joke: someday we’ll go to Ireland, to County Cork, and look up our parents’ relatives.
But the sun is so strong today I can’t stay with Angela in ‘44. Instead I find myself at North Beach in 1933. The boat’s just docked and I’m running as fast as I can, trying to beat my brothers to that first glimpse of the sea.
Later I lie down under a she oak. Let the boat leave without me. When I wake up, there’s a harvest moon, rising slowly over the ocean. It makes a silver path on the water. For an instant, I’m so excited
my heart
stops.
But it starts again, and I walk into the water.
I follow the silver pathway. The sea is warm. Angela’s on a bodyboard way out where the waves are breaking. I can’t hear her for the sound of the sea, but I know what she’s saying:
“Come on, Charlie, you’ve got to do it sometime!”
I wade into the ocean towards her. I can’t swim and yet I’m not afraid. I know that when I reach her, Angela will put out her hand and help me up on to the board—and then we’ll go to Ireland, just like we planned.
I wade along the path made by the moonlight. I keep my eyes on Angela and walk into the sea ...
Back on shore, the painters are talking.
“I sure wish I knew what he’s thinking,” the dark haired one’s saying.
“You blind?” the other one says. His voice is faint now as Angela and I sail away on the silvery sea. “He’s not thinking anything, he’s
just ...
asleep ...”
END
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Thank you for reading this story. If you enjoyed it, would you mind taking a few seconds to let your friends know about it, perhaps on Facebook, Google+ or Twitter?
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Dani
More stories in this series
“Reflections” is the 10th and last story in the O’Neill, Star and Lawson series.
[Undercover narcotics agents Michael O’Neill and Baby Johnson are sent to the northern rivers of New South Wales to bust a heroin dealer so big everyone up there calls him God.]
[Michael O’Neill and Baby Johnson, still suffering from PTSD, quit the Australian Narcotics Bureau and move to the far north coast of NSW. Each hopes love will save them.]
[Released from jail, Lawson, formerly the heroin manufacturer known as God, fails in his attempt at suicide, but he manages to save Star from her abusive relationship with Wayne.]
[Almost all the men in Star’s life have turned out to be violent. In choosing Wayne, she thinks she is breaking the pattern.]
[When Lawson is forty he goes to Maralinga to investigate a mysterious coin found there. Here he meets Jamie Stanborough, who seduces Lawson for his own ends.]
[“Trio” consists of 3 very short stories: “The Sunflowers; A Happily Married Man” and “The State of Grace.”]
[When O’Neill finally breaks up with Azure, he seeks help. Unfortunately, he becomes obsessed with his psychiatrist Adrianne West.]
[While working at night, Johnson is hit by a train. In the last seven minutes of his life, before his brain shuts down, he imagines he has found the mythical kingdom of Parthenia.]
Previews for all 10 stories are at: https://danielledevalera.wordpress.com/short-story-previews/
A collection of these stories both in e and in print will be released at the end of 2015. If you’d like to be notified in advance of any new release, please send me an email at
[email protected] I’ll be happy to add you to my mailing list.
About the author
Until the publication of her novel Magnificat in 2013, Danielle de Valera was best known for her short stories, which won a number of awards and appeared in such diverse publications as Penthouse, Aurealis and the Australian Women’s Weekly. Many of her short stories are set on the far north coast of New South Wales, where she has lived since 1977.
A more comprehensive author bio is available at:
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/DanielledeValera
Other works by this author
MagnifiCat: an Animal Fantasy, 65,000 words, 288 pages.
[Meet the Katt family. Despite the love in their little cottage, they’re finding it hard to make ends meet. When the bank won’t grant more time t pay the mortgage, the Katts must find a way to save the day. A feel-good, animal fantasy for adults with the fairy tale ending we’d all like to have.] https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/377028
“Frankie and Juno”. Very short story, 1,000 words, 3 pages—a quick read.
[Frankie, a lovesick tom, falls for the beautiful Juno, an elegant white cat, but the relationship is not a success.] On Derek Haines’s e magazine Whizzbuzz
Shortz.
https://www.derekhaines.ch/shortz/2013/12/frankie-and-juno-a-fable-by-danielle-de-valera
Connect with me online
Twitter: https://twitter.com/@de_valera
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My blogs: 1. About Writing and Writers: https://danielledevalera.wordpress.com
2. Manuscript Development Services: https://patrickdevalera.wordpress.com
Questions or comments?
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to email me at:
[email protected] Need help with your writing?
I’ve been a freelance manuscript assessor since 1992, and an editor (copy, structural and creative) for even longer; I can also help you with simple formatting, if you are working in Word. I love helping emerging writers, and my rates are very reasonable. Check out:
https://patrickdevalera.wordpress.com/manuscript-development-services/
One last thing ...
Thank you for reading this story. If you enjoyed it, would you mind taking a few seconds to let your friends know about it, perhaps on Facebook, Google+ or Twitter?
Thank you,
Dani