In the last newsletter we revealed that the Year 10 Love of Literature class had written a novel which was being published. There are 2 copies of the novel in the library if you would like to read our work. Below is a sneak peek of one of the chapters written by Primrose Sands about a young woman called Dorothy Mae...
Here is Basil Stubbs, fifteen but shorter, and the collection of weighted knucklebones he clutches in his left hand.
And here are his two sisters, grubby and small and inconsequential to his grand plan.
But there, leaning weary, all angles and inward-turned knees, sits their mother. Her eyes were once lovely, and it shows. For girls to retain their mannerisms; short skirts and long hair with Mary-Jane heels to the sky, is conceivable until you conceive.
She was sixteen when it happened. She doesn’t talk about it.
And in this way, she knows she must curl herself about her children tight; chip away at the personality she held up dear until that point. Dorothy Mae, with her debating team and certain graduation— her feet are seized with Elmer’s glue to some classroom floor, firmly in the past. Sometimes, her sleep is interrupted by the two young ones scrambling over her legs; other times, by all the things that might have been.
Dorothy Mae wouldn’t let pity befall her; two jobs a grudging necessity, taken up with the zeal that endeared her to the Sisters and on the recommendation they quietly provided. Of course, they turned sour when she made her accusations against the Father— but her point remains.
Now, Basil’s mum is too tired, with just enough of her left to buy bread with the government benefits she didn’t know she was eligible for.
Now, they discuss her openly; little Dorothy and her bastard brood, each one to a different Yank and the first, she reckons, to the presider— behind umbrellas and newspaper stands and to her bare face. She crumples every time, not enough effort expended on resistance of the criticism she was never subject to in her first sixteen years. Golden girl gone psychotic.
In her inescapable present, the three course down their dry street, palms and spindly gum-twigs piled in gutters of the dole-bludger part of town. The tarmac shimmers, sticking to small feet. She goes back inside.
She feels herself drift, past dusty corners of her unowned house and unpaid bills piled on unowned furniture, intent on starting the breakfast dishes.
Her eyes draw to an inconspicuous little letter, abandoned by the sink. It feels more momentous than it looks.
And so, here is a list of the things Basil encloses in this envelope, in no particular order:
A methodical submission, dotted with misspelling; two stamps, bearing the likeness of Her Majesty in muted green pinpoint; three imperceptible ink smudges, collected from the table upon which he wrote it, directly contradicting the red in which his intended message has dried, and four brash footnotes looped into the margins.
Basil writes terribly, arranging nonsense and overlearned etiquette in a ramshackle bouquet for hopeful presentation to ‘Sir Arther—’ (she frowns) ‘—Morgan, Lieutenant-Governor’. He lays out his intention to join the armed forces, disjointed and childish, with almost admirable disregard for the age limits posted prominently at the recruitment stations in the city.
She stands, and reads, and sobs for a little.
And the realisation that he will do nothing good with his life breaks her.
One product two, times three by four— four with an exclamation, as in her advanced maths subjects— and her pre-bruised exoskeleton evaporates.
She’s poured her entire life into this boy; soul and sanity and blood, and for what? Enduring the ostracism and mental torture of one and a half dragging decades, touted as a living consequence to the girls she’d tutored just a year before, and he makes the conscious decision to stomp that contribution into sand. Sand of far north Papua, where he’s marked for death.
When she recalls it later, counting out hours on muddied fingers, she decides that this was the minute her intention finally, properly, set itself into motion.
Basil’s mother folds that letter carefully, wiggles its frayed corners back into the equally bedraggled envelope. Basil’s mother leaves the room, the house, a toddler on her hip and her son carrying the other, with string bags choking up her neck. Basil’s mother visits the grocery and butcher and baker in turn, makes dinner like it’s the last thing she’ll ever eat.
With coins scraped from far corners, Basil’s mother slots a pumpkin into his now-empty hands, with Mary run off somewhere to collect cream, manages a smile for Mrs Thompson at the service counter when she remarks on the change in diet.
The butcher smells like blood, but Basil’s mother forces down her misgivings and presses a finger to the cut of bacon that Ruth jabbers most excitedly in the direction of; glowers at the numbers that present themselves on the scales and coughs up anyway.
At the bakery on the corner, they collect a loaf of sourdough, half-staled and squishy and good for toast. Mary demands to hold it in their provisional teatowel, doily-patterned and threads pulled rough with overuse.
And in the midst of this familial bliss, she considers; yes, how she considers. Maternal filicide is a term that layers its connotations with affixes, like a noble girl in the old country and her petticoats; like the piles of greaseproof paper falling over each other on the bakery counter.
They’re home by four. Basil’s mother pulls a knife from the drawer, examines it in the shadow of Ruth’s flailing toddler arms, utilises some deliberation to sink it into their streaked-green pumpkin instead.
Selfish brats get their comeuppance.
As she drags a spoon through the heavy-based pot she’s only just heaved onto the stove, she thinks; casts her stares around the house at the things she’d had to baby-proof over the years, and considers a covert reversal of their multitude of vaguely threatening purposes.
And following her comprehensive dicing and mashing and slicing and stirring, her soup serves as justification for her fantasies; she watches silently as Mary sticks up her nose and dives for the bread, and Ruth spills half the bowl. Basil hasn’t done anything. Yet.
Thus, she clears up quickly, directs Basil towards the dishes and the little two off to bed. Basil’s mother seethes with the idea that he would cost her so much and reap her nothing but a death notice; the value of unwanted life!
When she spots a streak of rank pumpkin left in the pot (he’d never applied himself to his work), she sends him off to the bedroom too, spitting terrible things under her breath. By the time she’s scrubbed the pots and pans another two times over, she’s calmed down marginally, and leans around the splintering door to check on the children.
Basil’s eyes follow her, cornflower blue in the dark. Pretty for a boy; with dark lashes and round pupils. Like hers, at almost the same age.
The two girls lay docile, nestled into each other like otters with tiny feet interlocked. Their hair is wet and clean and unscented, splayed over towels she’d set out earlier.
Overcome, lungs expanding with a sudden periphery of the ramifications of her decision, she skids back into the room; presses her children to her chest, tips back her head to contain the pooling tears in her eyelashes. A lopsided kiss to their cheeks, foreheads, chins, and she is finished.
“G’night, Ma.”
On the other side of the bed, curled into her sister, Mary murmurs in some semblance of assent.
She closes the door, harder than she meant. Thereafter, she allows herself twenty seconds of mourning, pulls a pin, pops open the gas pipe with a couple of seconds of twisting. It’ll look like a leak, she supposes, a freak accident derived of the bursting-to-full sewing basket dangling its contents precariously on the shelf above. Either way, the cheap metal is soft from heavy evening heat, propagating the notion of their quick and easy demise. She almost regrets it for a further twenty, then lands on an uneasy justification— if she’d brought those three into the world, what was to stop her sending them back out?
Holding that thought in the forefront of her conscience, she runs.
And, and, and— here is Dorothy Mae Stubbs. No shackles to remind her of her mistakes; only her and the night, and she finally feels like she can breathe again.
It’s dark out— not enough to motivate her to pull her kitchen scissors aloft yet, even with the flighty disposition she’s become known for, but with the sun sunk deep into the ceilings that intersperse the horizon and her eyes fuzzy with unaccustomed static.
She estimates her traipse through suburban streets at twenty minutes, of which she spends half trying to reroute. The middling light interferes with her visual memory, rendering once-familiar landmarks foreign. It’s almost as if the roads know what she’s done, and edit themselves into eerie labyrinths in turn. No. She’s never attended church particularly well, but she remembers God’s punishments were always a little more violent than shifting steps; a mailbox seeming too far to the left might be an underuse of His omnipotence.
Yet the disconcertion remains; she is not welcome here, in this street or suburb or town.
She allows her feet to carry her, and only her; with the absence of a toddler or two weighing down her shoulders, a certain clarity inhabits her gait. They take her to the dilapidated train station, fed on the subconscious need to get far away.
Once the too-small painted lettering is in sight, she breaks into her second sprint of the night (feeling like a proper Ralph Craig), and collapses hard on a bench bolted to the wall. The lanterns above her head sit dead and empty.
While the station’s closed, she realises in a fit of worry, she can’t escape Beenleigh; and the longer she stays in this godforsaken town, the more vulnerable she is to investigation over her children’s probable— no, likely— never mind; hopeful deaths. She can’t bear the idea of those three having any further impact on her comings and goings, and knows that she’ll never hold up in a court of law; sweet, sensitive Dorothy Mae’s tendency to cry under pressure, which gathered sympathy in high school, is a crippling hindrance now.
Therefore, she retrieves a route map thus far regaled to a grimy brochure holder and retreats to a similarly-sanitised cleaner’s nook, unfolds it to a ridiculous breadth, determined to make it out with her pride intact— even if she is, kind of, a little bit, a murderer.
She begins by marking out Logan (Beenleigh isn’t pictured). New South Wales, she reasons, is much too far and much too expensive, as she cordons along the Queensland border carefully with a blunted pencil. When she darts it at the map in a sudden spell of boredom, a small dent appears next to what she knows as the cane-growing regions, and what the cartographers have labelled the Mackay Regions. She sounds it out, decides it’s destiny, and places squiggles next to the route numbers she’ll have to memorise in order to get far enough away from her otherwise enormous repercussions.
Dorothy doesn’t remember sleeping; simply assumes she resembles a homeless ghoul and trudges what seems a mile to the ticketing booth. The young clerk who arrives a little later, polite surprise designating her expression, sells her a one-way as soon as she manages to locate the booth keys— though, she reckons, it’s only because the little ones haven’t been fed protocol for the event of an insane woman requesting a pass in perfect private-school English with exact change.
The train reminds her of a cattle car, with more window than wall and a constant roaring wind to match. She grabs a pole, settles into the grooves in the floor, and readies herself for a long, terrible journey— 23 and three-quarters of an hour, by her calculation, excepting stops. Boredom seems such a drag now— yesterday, she might have died for fifteen minutes of it; a break in the seemingly never-ending cycle of fulfilling demands and needs and feeding ungrateful children. Now, it has ended.
Concerned by this newfound tedium, she entertains herself with observing the passengers that climb aboard before their 7:00 am departure. This decidedly unusual habit of people-watching, nurtured carefully since childhood in pursuit of the side effect that it rendered her quiet and mild-mannered, now serves as a genuine asset— she avoids the well-dressed worker when he swears at the conductor’s inability to install seats in the carriage, moves closer to the elderly woman who apologises for his, as she words it, ‘unruliness’.
Two hours in, her flawless intuition proves wrong. The woman, who Dorothy’s learned is called Mary (she jolts) from the tacit embroidery on her travel bag, shifts uncomfortably; steps away from the tin walls as they dent inwards periodically and spills a portion of crystalline powder. She looks up, down, and grinds it into the floor with the heel of her shoe. Dorothy stares past her pointedly, hoping that she doesn’t have a weapon in her bag in addition.
The further north they travel, the less attention passengers seem to pay to general social mores— drink, shoes and cigarettes are bandied about the carriage, with the few families aboard huddled into their corners and trying to contain children who pull at their mothers’ enclosed arms to play with the rowdy new kids.
God, what hell-train has she boarded?
Her nails press crescents into her palms, worsened by their run-ragged edges. The flashes of sun she can differentiate from lighters begin to dip in the sky. She cycles through an experimental series of positions, readjusting when her joints seize up (often), in a slump against her same pole.
Someone draws a blanket around her shoulders haphazardly, and she jolts from a half-reverie. It’s not cold, despite the unending whipping of wind through the too-big windows— rather, the breeze is strangely slow and humid without wetness— and she’s hunched into a thick canvas jacket anyway. It was her father’s, evidently, from the service patches dotting its expanse of fabric, which crumple into each other on a body that’s skinnier than designed.
Disregarding all of this, however, she peers down from behind the knots of her new shawl at the child who’s decided it might be beneficial, and watches him scramble back across the aisle to two grandmothers, a couple of tittering aunties (who obviously bestowed this task upon him with much cajoling), several cousins and three— no, four, here appears a little tot from under some passenger legs— brothers. They look first-generation, all effortless Italian and efforted English, probably gone to join their husbands on the canefields.
She realises how wrong she is when they reach the Mackay stop, as they pile into an automobile and throw her pitying smiles. They own the canefields. The car peels off from the half-developed curb slowly, and then all at once; a world separated from the horses that choke up certain inner-city streets in Brisbane.
Can’t her instincts stick it out, now that she needs them? She doesn’t have time to wonder. It’s just struck her, in the middle of this unassuming junction, that she has no more plans.
And so, she wanders; kicks paperbark with conviction into badly-maintained gutters and makes herself a general nuisance. Searching for a sign, she supposes, that might give her a non-cardinal direction.
It presents itself by way of an already-derelict Queenslander, meat flaking from its relatively new bones in a mockery of the ‘For Let’ sign set neatly against its picket fence. Poor construction, she guesses, or care, but isn’t complaining; the gate is open and revealing a cramped paddock of a backyard, in which anyone could miss a woman camping out.
Fancying herself daring, she slips into the house; it’s concurrently dry and damp, lightened only by wide windows— she’s reminded of the train she’s only just become unaccustomed from, still trying to keep light balance on heavy ground, and wonders if it’s a recurring theme in architecture up here.
Unimpressed, she wades back out, jolting down wonky stairs and through knee-high palm leaf piles, compressed to decomposition with their own weight. A coconut lies by the chicken wire, small and inedible and spattered with paint. She stares at it for a minute, and a sudden rush of empathy overwhelms her; she, too, is marked up and unpalatable and alone.
But she’s bored of that idea already. She rips down a curtain onto the softest bit of timber floor she can locate, deposits her jacket as if to guard it from the other homeless that she hasn’t seen and floats, floats, floats— down the street, around the corner, into the central district.
She passes a school on her way— Our Lady of Mercy, it’s called, and the schoolgirls milling and rushing about in equal measure scare her to bits, reminiscent of her traumatising peers. They untuck their starched blouses and flutter, down the riverside and across the road, like swans in entirely too much fabric. Dorothy poorly disguises her nose wrinkling; their perfume is tangible and completely scandalous for their age, she rationalises. And she continues, hoping that they’ve finished recently enough that she won’t encounter any students in town.
Brick and portico characterise these buildings, with an empty clock tower jutting from a largely flat horizon; she’s reminded of not-home, just downsized and sparse. As she stands, still with hands dropped to her sides, a grotty-faced teenager speeds past and bids her ‘good day, madam’; and flinches. Turns her head slow and aware, watches him sprint towards ‘Harbour Rd, 1.5 miles’, and is reminded of what she wrenched from the face of the earth.
She figures her way back with measured steps, still unsure.
Dorothy was never much good in Visual Art, one of her only less-than-stellar points; her lines too thin and tentative to imitate the teacher’s great, sweeping strokes on canvas with oil and heavy acrylic. Now, they fit her hand, and the faces that she prints into the back of a rotting envelope— round eyes, soft hair, small noses and wonky teeth— that she made and supplemented and suffocated. What she’s done, she realises, is stacked new regrets on top of her old ones, and knows that further escape is futile.
What might have been? She imagines Basil in a khaki uniform, life ripped from his body in a more painful method. The girls, poorer even than they had ever been, shuttled between orphanage after orphanage.
She inserts the envelope into an inner pocket, signed, titled and dated; rolls the jacket into a bundle small enough to fit the largest of the gaping cavities dotted into the derelict walls. Once she’s backburnt the rest of her legacy, this will be what remains; created of her own volition and curated for what makes her feel the least.
She marches off again, under a summer-darkened sky heavy with the threat of rain, in search of that Harbour Road. To her disappointment, it has no actual relation to the port except for a noticeably better-maintained street running off it at the quarter-mile mark; she diverges and is rewarded by the sliver of greenish sea that appears above the skyline, dotted by maybe five vessels.
Stop. Breathe. Does the ocean hem her in, or offer passage?
Registration and health checks and qualifications are overrated.
Dorothy Mae Stubbs settles herself into the crook of a hammock with a corned beef sandwich and self-satisfaction. She giggles like the sixteen-year-old she always thought she was— that Basil almost was— grins at the ceiling where army-trained ship hands stomp about, with proper bread between her teeth. She’s sure they won’t miss their rations.
Maybe she’ll be a hero. Do it for her son.
