Jan Owen

Mondays Began with one plait loose, a pip in your teeth and late for Geography, lined and blank, facts to the right, tall stories left. To sail the heat in a weatherboard classroom boat with banana and vegemite colouring the air sargasso green. To ship ten thousand things on cursive seas to the edge of the known page —coffee, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves. To import small desires and grown-up needs in little packets of time for show and tell. To carve your name on the prow. To wait for the bell. In the Parlour only the French clock answered back. They sat cross-legged on the Persian carpet; destinations flashed by the smell of Marveer, lavender, dusty velvet. They opened their eyes in the olden times to fossick under the coffin flaps of the jarrah window seat for proper advice from disheveled magazines: nose straighteners, recipes, posture improvers, the runt who smoked and the chap who rowed. They didn’t see foresight’s guarded smile, they didn’t hear hindsight howl like a dog; the riddles were wordy, the clues were dumb: lopped head of a doll, silk wedding sleeve, gilt volumes, silverfish, and in the glass case, untouchable figurines locked away as grown-ups always seemed to be: shepherd and shepherdess on their marks, Wedgwood, Royal Doulton, Limoges? The real thing? Almond Trees cover Willunga Plains: like the misty breath of winter children, the blossom hovers. Dearth, says the black bark, splits to let scent through with open questions where when why what who? As for that earliest aroma fear, she’d  smell it, taste it, anywhere, one part in a million, pungent as coffee or smoke, already there in her mother’s milk. Against its grey unbeing she caught at talismans – black stones on a white plate, concrete nouns clattering out of thought. Marking time down the dead-end street to morning. Why was it always dark in the quiet hall? Through a memory crack of light an edge squeezed round the door: regret to inform stop missing in stop the air elliptic with tracer fire, familiar eyes glancing away, prismatic as flies’. Voices crept and huddled,where’s Daddy’s girl? He did come back, but who? They could not tell. Collections began. The tang of foreign coins lent her a lingo and currency for the unknown; Brother stuck down squares of expedited love with serrated edges. And they were invited to a fancy-dress ball with games of us and them. Father could not come for he was lame and Mother had to watch and wait not play so they learned dolls and trains and night and day and Snakes and Ladders and Hide and Seek. Knight’s gambit. Castle your king. Check. And when the black door opened and they knew threshold was famished, Brother stepped through. Now fear had her ID and her address. Best send an invitation. Tell her guest the lightest thing she served would ward off harm – a stick, a stone, a cloud of white perfume, thought itself, needing a go-between to say ‘this fragrance is like newborn skin, these quickening trees, like Mary’s aging cousin conceiving all baptism out of season’. She Collected Dictionaries as other women take up men and shelve them: manuals, grammars, Teach Yourself German, Malay, Italian, Swahili, Welsh, like a passion for clothes that would hang unworn in the dark, for peridots, garnets, amethysts, pearls in a shut case, nouns declined. Each unknown word shone with delicious fire and the alien phrases silked her skin with their genders and connotations. She might have been the end house on the waterfront of Macau welcoming every sailor in. But the longing for many tongues to part her lips – si, igen, ja, ah oui, yes, yes – was departure’s smile, a leaning to the wind that sweeps a glitter of light across the sea and sets a silvery chill at the neck. Quick, to those books guarding the mantelpiece, ISBNs snug as a span of days; to bread and fruit and sparkling wine. She had been given a cyclamen with scent, some new trick that married violet and rose, as if a flower should yearn to sing and the pink timbre tremble into quietest words. She touched her flesh and knew that it would fade as speech did and did not. And yet it was not language that she sought, nor the music of any meaning. An old allegiance drew her on beyond the first ground of thought and the idea even of silence to the fifth season which must at last return with its weather of recognition and its lost ends.

‘Thirty years ago. And only yesterday,’ says Balázs, slapping at a fly. We sit beside a bottle underneath his vines and watch the football arc between his sons. ‘Check through the corner one,’ the sergeant says, ‘and make it short and sweet. Take a couple of men.’ (Seventeen-year-olds still nervous with a gun.) It’s an office block like most down the derelict street; he keeps a good five metres ahead, tries the rooms along each corridor and beckons the two boys on. They reach the third floor, breathing easier now. The Council Chamber’s here, empty but for a tangle of chairs at the northern window end (unseemly three-day corpses, wooden legs in the air); dried into the floor – blood-stains; and seeping through the shattered panes the distant dialogue of cross-fire. Directly opposite him – another door. He notes the fact an instant before it opens sharply and his counterpart – the hated AVO uniform of green – levels his gun and time is not. They freeze. Somewhere beyond, the seconds slide away; between their eyes the slender lifeline holds across the mirror of air. ‘Döntetlen barátom azt hiszem’: Stalemate I think, my friend. Each slightly lowers his gun and slowly, eyes still locked, takes one step back. The two doors close together, softly as hands on a prayer. ‘Senki sincs ott,’ each says to his men: Nobody there. ‘In Hungary we used to say Néha a második alkalom jön először– sometimes the second chance comes first.’ He’s silent, years away. The day is insubstantial, seems to float in the dry gum-scented heat. Only the football’s thud, steady as the beat of some huge heart, holds us in time and space. He rouses himself to swear: ‘Az anyád, off the kohlrabi,rossz gyerekek,’ then pours us another beer. The head on each glass whispers small talk; we blow the froth into the air.

Titian’s Young Englishman with a Glove, circa 1530 It happened in Physics, reading a Library art book under the desk, (the lesson was Archimedes in the bath) I turned a page and fell for an older man, and anonymous at that, hardly ideal – he was four hundred and forty-five, I was fourteen. ‘Eureka!’ streaked each thought (I prayed no-one would hear) and Paradise all term was page 179 (I prayed no-one would guess). Of course my fingers, sticky with toffee and bliss, failed to entice him from his century; his cool grey stare fastened me firmly in mine. I got six overdues, suspension of borrowing rights and a D in Physics. But had by heart what Archimedes proves. Ten years later I married: a European with cool grey eyes, a moustache, pigskin gloves.