Amy Ridler reviews Compliances: A New Fear by Iphgenia Baal and Ben Graville for Toothgrinder Press.

Review: Compliances: A New Fear by Iphgenia Baal and Ben Graville

Amy Ridler reviews Compliances: A New Fear by Iphgenia Baal and Ben Graville for Toothgrinder Press.

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Mstyslav Chernov, Ukrainian MSLR BM-21 ‘Grad’ shoots toward Russian positions at the frontline in Kharkiv region, Ukraine. 2 August 2022. Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022

Ukraine Lab: Lessons from the Frontlines

Ukraine has been often called a laboratory when it comes to global challenges in the spheres of environment, information, and security. The site of the worst nuclear catastrophe in history, the first target of the Kremlin’s troll farms and disinformation campaigns, the country to spark the collapse of the Soviet Union and to stand up to its neo-imperialist successor: Ukraine has been the first to face and, at times, set in motion, processes that have worldwide consequences.

Russia’s all-out attack became a wake-up call for the international community. The world was first shocked by the sheer brutality of the invasion, then by its own ignorance about the country invaded. It turned out Ukrainians were not ready to surrender to the seemingly superior military power: neither in 72 hours, as was predicted by many western intel agencies, nor seven months into the full-scale war. It turned out Ukrainians were defiant. It turned out their defiance had a history of which the world knew nothing. It turned out the outsiders’ perceptions of Ukraine were shaped by Russia’s imperialist narratives.

Today, the value of Ukrainian knowledge and experience can no longer be dismissed. The urgency to learn from Ukraine is now existential for the rest of the world.

Ukraine Lab is an online writing residency for emerging writers from Ukraine and the UK tasked with exploring global challenges through the prism of Ukraine. The thematic focus of the creative nonfiction pieces by Kris Michalowicz and Sofia Cheliak is war. ‘Luhansk, Stolen’ reminds us that Russia’s war of aggression did not start on 24 February 2022 but has been raging on for eight years. ‘Ukrainian Lottery’ takes a look at those surprising Ukrainians who reject the ready-made model of victimhood and resist the enemy with a sense of humour and a sense of purpose.

Ukraine Lab is run by the Ukrainian Institute London in partnership with PEN Ukraine and Ukrainian Institute. It is supported by the British Council as part of the UK/UA Season of Culture 2022. You can read ‘Luhansk, Stolen’ and ‘Ukrainian Lottery’ in Ukrainian here [link to the Ukrainian publication]. Ukraine Lab pieces focusing on the environment have been published in The Ecologist, while the pieces tackling disinformation will appear in openDemocracy.

Sasha Dovzhyk is a special projects’ curator at the Ukrainian Institute London and Associate Lecturer in Ukrainian at the School of Slavonic and East-European Studies, UCL. She has curated Ukraine Lab.

Mstyslav Chernov, Visual interpretation of Ukraine Lab war theme, Ukrainian MSLR BM-21 ‘Grad’ shoots toward Russian positions at the frontline in Kharkiv region, Ukraine. 2 August 2022
Mstyslav Chernov: Ukrainian MSLR BM-21 ‘Grad’ shoots toward Russian positions at the frontline in Kharkiv region, Ukraine. 2 August 2022. Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022
Mstyslav Chernov, Birds fly over the residential building in Kostyantynivka, eastern Ukraine, February 8, 2022

Kris Michalowicz, Luhansk Stolen: Ukraine Lab

Ukraine Lab is run by the Ukrainian Institute London in partnership with PEN Ukraine and Ukrainian Institute. It is supported by the British Council as part of the UK/UA Season of Culture. You can read the pieces in Ukrainian in Тиждень. Ukraine Lab pieces by Kateryna Iakovlenko and Jonathon Turnbull, focusing on the environment have been published in The Ecologist, while the pieces tackling disinformation will appear in openDemocracy.
About Ukraine Lab
Sofia Cheliak, Ukrainian Lottery, (In Ukrainian)
Kris Michalowicz, Luhansk Stolen, (In Ukrainian)
Mstyslav Chernov: Birds fly over the residential building in Kostyantynivka, eastern Ukraine, February 8, 2022. Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022
This is how they steal your hometown from you. This is what they did to your Luhansk.

They bring in droves of drunken russians from over the border by bus and have them hoist mutant two-headed eagles on every flagpole. The russians bully their way into the heart of the city and proclaim themselves the heroes of a ‘great patriotic war’ from long ago. They swear this city – which they have never set foot in before – has always been their city. They say it always will be; that they have returned from exile to reunite your city with them like a lost child with its mother.

Then the russians hand in their tracksuits and football tops for military fatigues. Instead of the russians tri-colour and the ribbon of Saint George, they now have small arms and artillery. They look like boys playing a game of soldiers, dressing up in their fathers’ clothes to try look like men. They belch cologne and slur grand proclamations about a country that never existed. This country is as real to them in their drunken stupor as a desert mirage and, to breathe life into it, they have to capture buildings, abduct and torture your neighbours. What they can’t rape or kill, they eat or steal.

The streets you grew up on become a smuggler’s cove; the fields you wandered, a haunted graveyard. A curfew is imposed, and at night the drunks sing songs from a war they never fought. They wear insignia and icons and toast heroes from a country they can’t remember living in. This city of strangers, they swear, is the same as the one you were raised in. These strangers were always your neighbours.

Your father took you and your mother away from the city and to your family dacha just outside of Luhansk, where the steppe opens up and only the flocks of birds stencilled into the sky keep time from coming to a complete standstill. From there, you spent your sixteenth birthday feeling the tremble of the earth beneath your feet. You watched the dull illumination of mortars and the eerie glow of tracer fire in the distance. Friends and their families disappeared to Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv. Their shelled and empty homes looked like lanterns with the candles burnt out after All Saints’ Day.

Your mother begged your father to follow the others, but all he could say (after swilling the sediments from the wine in his mouth) was Why should we leave?

Although you felt your mother’s fear in your own blood, you shared your father’s sentiment. This, after all, was still Luhansk. Your Luhansk. Who had the right to tell you which country it was or wasn’t? Who could sweep borders across the land like breadcrumbs across the table?

You looked just like your mother when she was a girl, but you inherited your father’s shining black eyes and deep, solitary attachment to the place where you were raised. Like your father did when he was as a boy, you preferred to spend all your time outside of class wandering the wild fields. You loved to stand under the noon sun and look across them, feeling like the horizons touched the very ends of the earth. You loved to study maps and languages and learn the mysteries of ancient empires, but curious as you were, you felt no desire to leave Donbas. You were open to the world, but wherever your thoughts drifted, they always came back home to Luhansk. Faraway places, with their legends and unpronounceable names, were something like curiosities and no more. Like stones and leaves you’d find in the fields, you’d handle and inspect them, turn them over just to feel how they rested in your palm, before you’d discard them and walk on.

It was the same for your father. Unlike many of the drunks recruited by russia to steal the city, he could actually remember the Soviet Union with clear eyes, the toil it demanded of a person. His twenties were lost in its honour to a dreary military service on the top of the world in Murmansk, where he kept his thoughts to himself and plotted and yearned to return to Luhansk and never leave again. His resolve to do so was so strong it pressed its shadow into you, his daughter.

Apart from making wine, your father’s great passion was fishing. You once told him about a boyfriend from school and his first question was Does he fish? You told him no and he replied Tell him not to waste another second! He doesn’t know what he’s missing! On the weekends you and your mother – the people your father called his best friends – accompanied him for lazy picnics by the river. These car trips took you further out of the oblast and showed you tributaries of the Luhan and the Mius. In an old photograph now lost, your father faces away from his wife’s camera, the lens catching only the edge of his smile as he perches on the riverbank. But you face your mother, your eyes sparkling in the shade of your father’s contentment as you proudly hold up his catch in your hands.

Your mother dressed the house in flowers and nurtured you under ferns. The bitterness of wine contrasted the sweetness of lilies and peonies. The house was full of books, both in russian and Ukrainian, and you loved to read in both languages. But rather than sneaking books to bed at night to read with a torch under the covers, you took paper and pencils. You drew by torchlight as your parents lay asleep in each other’s arms in the next room. You made diagrams of your mother’s plants and sketched your father’s rivers. You bathed in the warmth of your parents’ love. They never argued, your father never swore. Although his wine was his pride, you never once saw him drunk.

Now the city became starved by drunks who sang dead men’s songs and flew the flag of a fictitious place. But at the refuge of your dacha, facts would remain facts. The fields, uninterrupted by buildings, would still welcome you, and Ukraine would stay Ukraine. Your father still had to go into Luhansk to work. He’d see the skids of tank tracks in the streets, portraits of Lenin and Stalin like undead risen from their tombs. The drunks guarded checkpoints, clinging to their guns. Their charcoal silhouettes haunting the roads looked like scarecrows come to life to wander in from the fields in search of a brain.

You turned eighteen and your parents moved back into Luhansk, so your father could keep an eye on the garage he owned and guard it from looters. A stray cat moved in with you at the dacha and your neighbours regarded you and it as something like a witch in her covenstead. This strange girl who lived alone, who never thought about marriage or children, and didn’t eat meat. The cat watched you as you scarred the frying pan in your efforts to cook. It hunted mice and saw you endure an intermittent water supply and faltering electricity. The sparse furnishings of the dacha calmed your artist’s eye. It was no longer possible to even transact with a local bank or post office without collaborating with the enemy, so you made a living freelancing online as a graphic artist. In the evenings you read Ukrainian poetry to yourself in a faint whisper.

You were hidden from the world.

Your art was a hymn to these remote suburbs. Removed from the militarised city, it was sometimes possible – if only for fleeting moments – to pretend you were free. The images you rendered were smooth and rounded and warm. With your hands you brought to life scenes from the city outskirts. A bumblebee visiting a barefooted girl sat among wild flowers. A bike ride. A young boy sailing away in a daydream boat down the Krynka to reach the sea. A kitchen table where a cup of coffee steams next to a bowl of three beaten eggs, a fork resting on the side. Years passed and your artwork became more vivid and insular. It protected you from what was happening inside the city, where russians staggered among the ruins, delirious with alcohol poisoning.

You turned nineteen; you turned twenty. At New Year, your parents refused to toast at midnight, waiting instead until 1am so as to not celebrate at the same time as Moscow. And the safety of the world depicted in your art became evermore disconnected with Luhansk as it had become. You noticed birds of prey hunting in the trees surrounding the dacha and taking off with something weak and helpless. In a nearby village, a wolf dragged away a little boy. Every now and then a forgotten landmine, left somewhere in a drunken blackout, took someone’s life or leg. Your father’s rivers were now desiccated or bled a polluted rusty red. You still felt like you lived in a fairy-tale, but now with only the dark, sinister elements left in.

Ever since the russians shelled your street in the city and forced you and your parents to leave for the dacha, you swore to yourself you’d never worry again about anything less than life and death. You knew what could happen to a body. Bodies failed; bodies could be ripped apart. Where once there was a person, a consciousness, there is now something unrecognisable; a prop in a horror film. A bullet or a shell erased a person and all of the memories and love contained within them. That’s why in your sixteenth year you made a silent vow to yourself to never get close to anyone or anything that could be stolen from you.

But now in the silence of the dacha something was changing inside you. When you fell asleep your mind showed you images, textures, played fugue notes that collaged into a feeling. The feeling then grew hands and breathed and became a body of its own, touching you and loving you and holding you until the morning as your nails traced its back. Then it would dissolve upon awakening, and you’d sit up alone in bed, feeling like the dacha was haunted. An echo, an absence, lingered in the air. The scent of someone who was never there.

During the days too you dreamed of other things. Public parks bustling with happy families. Flags of blue and yellow. Crowds staying out late. Everyone safe, speaking their minds. These daydreams buzzed with chatter in Ukrainian and Surzhyk. To think of yourself separated from Luhansk was to imagine yourself in a vacuum. But now you felt at last the need to leave, to follow the whisperings of sleep and feel the things you saw and touched in dreams.

You stood in line with the pensioners at Stanytsia Luhanska, feeling like you were about to cross the river Styx to go back into the world of the living. The russians at the crossing asked if you had a boyfriend and looked at you like you were an item in a warrior’s harem. They were so beguiled by you in their boredom they neglected to search your bags. You wondered if all it took was a smile for you to be able to smuggle bombs for the resistance and copies of Kobzar back across the demarcation line undetected.

You followed your friends to Kharkiv and enrolled at university, where for four years of total freedom you jumped at every loud noise and lay awake at night worried for your parents. Then the russians decided Kharkiv was also their city. So once again, just like the day they shelled your street back in Luhansk at the start of it all, you crouched for the last time in fear of the murderous sky.

 

Kris Michalowicz won the Creative Future bronze prize for fiction in 2018. In 2022, he was a writing resident with the Ukrainian Institute London. He lives and volunteers in Ukraine.

 

Please note: since Russia’s full-scale invasion, many Ukrainians and supporters have refused to capitalise the name of the aggressor state and its people. This piece uses lower case in accordance with the author’s preference.

Mstyslav Chernov_soldier_burning

Sofia Cheliak, Ukrainian Lottery: Ukraine Lab

Ukraine Lab is run by the Ukrainian Institute London in partnership with PEN Ukraine and Ukrainian Institute. It is supported by the British Council as part of the UK/UA Season of Culture. You can read the pieces in Ukrainian in Тиждень. Ukraine Lab pieces by Kateryna Iakovlenko and Jonathon Turnbull focusing on the environment have been published in The Ecologist, while the pieces tackling disinformation will appear in openDemocracy.

About Ukraine Lab
Sofia Cheliak, Ukrainian Lottery, (In Ukrainian)
Kris Michalowicz, Luhansk Stolen, (In Ukrainian)

Mstyslav Chernov, A Ukrainian serviceman in front of the destroyed headquarters of the Mykolaiv regional military administration in southern Ukraine after a Russian strike. August 5, 2022. Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022
Mstyslav Chernov: A Ukrainian serviceman in front of the destroyed headquarters of the Mykolaiv regional military administration in southern Ukraine after a Russian strike. August 5, 2022

War-time Lodgings
The small 900-square-foot apartment, built to accommodate one person, now housed five people: all had moved in here to free up their own homes to accommodate those who were forced to abandon theirs and flee into uncertainty. This was not an exception: divorced couples moved in together, long-estranged paramours did the same, relatives that had seen each other once before shared homes, and cats, dogs, and fish all got along just fine. People slept on mattresses, in sleeping-bags, on a couch, three to a double bed. But that was nothing: Ira had taken reservations for the spots on the floor of her apartment.
Anna looks up from her zoom meeting and gives me a hug that has become routine—the hug that says, “I am so happy that you exist and you are here right now.”
Maksym gives me the same hug and says, “Sofia, do a dance. We have a bottle of wine. Ira’s friend from Poland, the reporter, brought it.”
I sit down in the red armchair under the window, light up a cigarette, and realize that things are almost as they have always been. We’re about to have dinner, just like we used to, we can stop working for a bit, and perhaps, for the first time since it all began, speak in sentences longer than, “I’ve got three families from Donetsk, and I can house two, can you find room for the third?” We will have some illegal wine.

Please, Just Leave Us Alone
This was before the shortage of petrol, but after the ban on alcohol sales. Maksym picked me up from my office in his car an hour before curfew. He had heard that my guests from the East did not make it.
Maksym works in alternative education. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, he has been helping teachers and students set up learning in evacuation. He also takes humanitarian aid to the regions near the front. His car was shot at multiple times. It took him forever to find replacement glass, and for a while his very expensive vehicle sported a large hole taped over with scotch-tape. He has a deferment from the military service, but he is getting himself ready to go to the front. A saint.
During those days, the highway from Kyiv to Lviv was one single traffic jam. The family with a small child who were supposed to stay with me for three days decided to spend the night in a hotel hallway. They were lucky there was room for them in the hallway. To be alone in the beginning of the war meant two things: one, that you had an apartment (which was good), and two, that you were putting yourself in danger (not so good).
Alone, you might not hear the air-raid siren and die in a rocket strike.
Nothing had hit the city yet, but you were getting used to the idea that you were mortal. And that every day you were still alive was like winning a lottery: you got lucky.
The city would empty out about an hour ahead of curfew (at 22:00); during the day, it acquired the look of an impregnable bastion, ready to take the hit—sandbags and check-points everywhere. The boot of our car was like a mobile supply depot of a military unit. We had three bullet-proof vests, four helmets, pain-killers of various strength, chemical protection suits, tourniquets, Israeli bandages, a dozen of first-aid kits, two boxes of canned food, three canisters of petrol, and a ton of various smaller bits and pieces. The following day, all this was supposed to go to Kharkiv. All this was pulled together in half-a-day, as soon as my friend heard folks were leaving the next morning. You could get anything necessary on the front-lines in the city in those days. Our city became the main sorting point for equipment and humanitarian aid that flowed into Ukraine, while Ukrainians all over Europe were raising money and buying up gear. In a few days, you would not find a single bullet-proof vest or a tourniquet in Poland, and a week later Germany was similarly cleaned out. In this manner, zig-zagging between check-points and wiring money to the military, we moved toward our Ukrainian dream: to be finally left alone, so we could just live our own life as an independent country.

Feminism in Ukraine Has Won
“It is official: Feminism has won. The girls are saving the country, and we are making dinner,” says my friend, Andriy.
He works in IT, and the war caught him on a business trip abroad. On the morning of February 24, the air space above Ukraine was closed and all flights canceled. Andriy traveled thousands of miles to get back, and finally crossed the border on foot. Men are prohibited from leaving the country until the end of the war. Andriy knew this but could not fathom not coming back. As soon as he returned, he went to the enlistment office, but was turned away.
“Someone has to make money to buy the drones,” they said. “We’ll call you if we need you.”
So: the three guys are making dinner while we are finishing work. Anna is negotiating with a group of international lawyers—we keep hearing the word ‘tribunal’ but politely ignore the conversation. Anna is a lawyer; one of the youngest to make partner at her firm. Before the war, she worked with business clients, but began taking on human rights cases in 2014. In most of these, she represented, usually pro bono, victims of political persecution, and she lobbied tirelessly for the release of Kremlin’s Ukrainian political prisoners. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Anna began collecting evidence of war crimes–the evidence that will eventually help take russia to court for crimes against humanity and genocide.
Ira is on the phone all the time. “Yes, we have a home for you in Krakow, Witek will pick you up at the border… There’s a family waiting for you in Rzeczow, they are happy to put you up for three days, until we can arrange transport for you to Vienna or Prague, wherever you want…” Before this invasion, Ira was an art curator: she organised exhibits of Ukrainian art in Europe and brought the work of European artists to Ukraine. Over years, she amassed a vast network of contacts all over the world which was now very helpful in evacuating women, children, and the elderly away from the russian bombs and occupation.
I am prepping for my next broadcast. I call a young, successful and intelligent writer to invite him to join a national marathon tomorrow: a shared broadcast by the country’s biggest channels that would run for 24 hours. He holds a pause and then says, “The intellectuals can all fuck off, I’m going to the front, I won’t be here to talk,” and laughs confidently.
I know it is himself and his previous life he is telling to fuck off as he prepares to take up arms. I laugh hard back at him. Ira interrupts her flow of phone calls.
“It’s so funny, I now talk to the air-raid sirens like I talk to my alarm clock. I make a deal and go back to sleep.”
“Got it. We’ll wake you up.”
“Can’t I just sleep?”
“We won’t sleep, so you won’t get to sleep either.”
“Either that, or we’ll get hit, and that’ll be the end of us. It’s a lottery.”
An air-raid siren wails, and we go to the basement.

The Dreamers
The raid lasted just under an hour. We returned to the apartment. We are six: three girls and three guys. In our previous lives, we worked, went on Tinder dates, flew to Berlin for parties, and bought art. We were the generation who had no memory of the Soviet Union. We were practically children when we got involved in the Revolution of Dignity in 2013, when our nation’s leadership did something unacceptable: used force against unarmed protesters. At the cost of those first lost lives and our collective grief, we won the right to determine our own destiny—until the russian regime interfered, annexing Crimea and invading Ukraine’s East. It was some time then that we grew up.
With no experience but learning quickly, we became part of the Ukrainian Youthquake. We were into fashion and art, and spoke several languages. By the age twenty, we had mastered wine pairings and gone to the world’s most important art museums. In 2014, when war began in our country, we realised we were mortal—and fell deeper in love with life. We had successful careers in creative industries that we built fairly, from the ground up, on merit and with faith in the future of our country.
And now our greatest joy is a chance to have dinner together. The guys started the water for the pasta, mixed up the sauce, and washed the vegetables for the salad, (we are the bourgeoisie who eat fresh vegetables even during a war).
The dinner was ready. We poured out our one priceless bottle of wine. It came out to about six sips for each of us.

Miss Ukraine 2022
Andriy was still on the phone, and we decided to start eating with him. Most of us remembered we had not eaten for two or three days—and not because there was no food. On the contrary, a hoarder instinct awoke in all of us, the genetic memory of previous wars and Holodomor, and ever since the first news of the possibility of a full-scale invasion started coming last autumn, we all put an extra can or two into our shopping carts on each trip. We did not eat because our bodies pumped out so much adrenaline they could only function on coffee and cigarettes. The only time you remembered about food was when someone put a cooked meal right in front of you.
Ira spoke first.
“You know, I got out of the bath this morning and saw myself in the mirror for the first time since it started. I mean, I had looked before, but just to make sure I didn’t have toothpaste all over my face. This time, I actually looked at myself. I’m all ribs.”
“Don’t catastrophise things. After we win, ours will be the land of the models, the way they looked in the 90s—“heroin”, pardon me, “war-time” chic. We’ve got our very own time machine here.”
“Listen, I never believed it when women in the movies about the Second World War had these nice tidy hair-dos, and wore dresses, and red lipstick—but look at Sofia now: full make-up and perfect hair. It’s like there’s no war,” Maksym teases me.
I realise I had not washed my face since the broadcast, so I look like I’m dolled up for a party. When I became a broadcaster, I hated that slick hair, the heels, the make-up. Now I feel like I’m one of about ten women left in the city who wear make-up. I usually wash my face and pull my hair into a bun before I leave the office; I feel very embarrassed to walk down the streets with my face all painted. Today, I forgot to do that, too. But that’s his fault: he distracted me with his talk.

Hedonism Days
“They keep bombing Kyiv,” Ivan says. He is an artist, and thanks to Ira, his work is known around the world. His pieces can be found in institutional collections all over Europe. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, he designs interiors for the newly built shelters that house temporarily displaced people.
“Just think, less than a month ago, a few days before the full-scale invasion, I was dancing in a bar in Kyiv. Against the backdrop of the alarming news, we were joking that those were our last days of hedonism. I mean, it sort of turned out like that, but it was all in a previous life.”
A long silence as we open and scroll through the news. We read about the defense of Kyiv and Kharkiv, and Anna starts talking to fill the silence.
“I went and bought myself a piece of gold jewelry. I tell myself I could trade it for a loaf of bread, if it comes to that.” “Ha-ha! And if it doesn’t, how are you going to explain it to the children you will have after the war? The fact that you bought it during the war?” “Right, they’ll think you did it in between digging a trench and running around with a machine gun.” “And next to her, Sofia, with her perfect curls, flitted from one trench to the next and wished her viewers a very good day…” “I made a manicure appointment for next month: this is the only thing I managed to plan that far.” Anna at some point remembered the value of sustainable development, and determined to make plans not just for the day or the week, like everybody else, but for a month. We looked at her as if she were a mad prophetess. The war turned out to be different from what we had imagined. We would hide in bomb-shelters—but then go to a newly opened restaurant whose owner kept buying automobiles for the front. We would buy clothes from Ukrainian designers—and know that, while making the profit they needed to keep funding their businesses, they would donate a portion of the proceeds to the military. We could make a manicure appointment—thus providing employment for a woman who had arrived on the previous evacuation train from the East. Our former lives with parties and receptions to be attended in cocktail dresses felt very distant, but everything we brought back we did for the Armed Forces of Ukraine and our victory.
“We’ll cancel it for you if we have to,” Maksym jokes. He means in case a random rocket hits the building where we are. We roar with laughter. Anna has just raised the stakes in the lottery.

Basic Instinct
“Well, my friends, I have had calls from all my exes. Every one of them. They worry about me, bless them,” Andriy says, with a touch of pride.
“Calling is nothing,” Ira laughs. “Mine was coming from the safety of Europe to rescue me out of Ukraine.”
“Well, shit! What did you tell him?”
“Told him to fuck off at first. Then I told him if he was coming anyway, our shelter needed some basic drugs. And that I was not going anywhere: this is my country, this is my home, and I’ll die here if I have to,” Ira says.
“Hey, Andriy, did you tell your exes how crappy your libido gets under air-raids?”
Even here, far away from the front-lines, we had forgotten about sex and sexuality. We put on the same clothes day after day because making a different choice required an effort. The chats on our phones exploded with messages. We wrote “How are you?” to friends from the cities that russians hit what felt like every minute. Certain words lost their significance. We knew we had to tell our friends, of all genders, “I love you” if that’s how we really felt. Love for one’s own, and hatred of the enemy—this is what helped us get out of bed in the morning (on those exceptional mornings when the air-raid sirens did not do it).
“I feel the opposite,” Anna says. “I really want to have sex with those guys in uniform and to have their babies. Only how am I supposed to have babies in the world where they won’t close the sky and children get used to sleeping in shelters, and all their games are about war?” She raises her eyes at us.
“I miss my son. I keep thinking of the day I put them on the train. My son and my wife left the country, and I won’t be able to see them any time soon. I cried on my way from the station. But they will live,” Ivan blurts.
Most people left because of the children. Women bundled infants in their warmest clothes and took them to the other side of the border. They crossed an imaginary line beyond which the sky was secured by NATO and wept at the despair of having left their homes. We don’t know who has it worse: we who had stayed or those who had left. To be on the other side of the border, near or far, is to live in a normal world, but without losing touch with our broken one. When you are ostensibly safe on the other side of that line, you feel every piece of news even more acutely. The women who left put their children above their own interests or mental health. They are alone in a foreign country where they cannot afford a nanny, and do not have their parents or a partner who could watch the kid while they go for a walk alone. Their lives revolve around their children and the news of casualties in their native cities. But to remain in Ukraine would have meant to put one’s child in danger. Most do not wish their children to play the lottery.

Adrenaline Roller-coaster Park
“If you are going to spread pessimism, I’ll kick you out of the apartment. Better let me show this video of how our nice Bayraktars blow up russian tanks. Look, there was a column of tanks—and now there is not.”
I look up with tears in my eyes.
“But what if we lose Kyiv? What if we never get Mariupol and Kharkiv back?”
The waves of adrenaline that made us capable of working two or three jobs and volunteer in-between would give way to deep pits of despair. Whenever that happened, the most important job was to support the person, to pull them out as quickly as possible. And then to keep working, working, leaving no opportunity for another fall.
“Even if they take them, we’ll get them back. Look, look: a nice little Bayraktar is flying through the sky… and there are fields below it, pretty summer fields…”
Boom!
“Feel better? If not, I’ll give you my wine. These six sips are not going to make a difference.”
“Thank you, a little better. I can’t take your wine.”
We watched a lot of russian content, too, to understand what people there were concerned about. It made us sick, but we could not stop. All of us at least read russian, and this gave us the tool to, let’s be frank about it, locate some hope that their society would organise, would protest, that they would begin fighting the regime from inside while we battled it at the front. Our hopes were in vain. Instead, we saw Instagram stories about the pain of sanctions (are you serious?) and threats to our President.
We grew up very early, just like the majority of our compatriots. While people of our age out in the West spent time wondering where they would apply for college after a few gap years, we were managing enormous projects and founding successful businesses. After the Revolution of Dignity, we learned very well that we needed to live life to the fullest and take responsibility for our every action.
We finished the food and the wine. It was a few minutes before midnight—we went to bed.

The Ukrainian Dream
The other day a well-known writer asked me whether I knew how to build my life from now on.
I realised I did not. I cannot plan or dream; I don’t know whether I will be alive tomorrow. But we are all certain that none of this is in vain. We are not afraid at all. We, young, beautiful, and accomplished, slept three to a bed that night. Yes, we just slept. We spent all our savings on assistance to the Ukrainian military. We worked twelve-hour days for our Ukrainian dream. Each of us, curiously, had something unique in mind, but this did not matter. We wanted one thing: for the russians to leave us alone so we could go on developing our careers, starting families, and renovating our homes not as a means of dealing with obsession but because we were confident no enemy rocket would strike it the next day. All of this is yet to come—when russia finally leaves us alone. In the early hours of the morning, the air-raid siren sounded, but we decided to ignore it. Rockets did not hit Lviv that day; we survived, and we had one more day to be young.

Translated by Nina Murray

 

Sofia Cheliak is programme director of Lviv BookForum as well as a TV host, cultural manager, translator from Czech into Ukrainian, and PEN-Ukraine member.

 

Please note: since Russia’s full-scale invasion, many Ukrainians and supporters have refused to capitalise the name of the aggressor state and its people. This piece uses lower case in accordance with the author’s preference.

Review: Instructions for the Working Day by Joanna Campbell

Kerry Mead reviews Instructions for the Working Day by Joan Campbell 


‘You go too far, my friend. You are near dangerous ground.’

Good literary fiction often delves deep into the human psyche and the myriad of ways the intricacies of human interaction can take form. Some literary fiction, for example, Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, or Sebastian Faulk’s Birdsong, act as proof that literary fiction set against a historical backdrop can also teach the reader something about our shared histories. These novels make use of the human to flesh out historical events and make them more relatable; also using creative narrative to conjure up the atmosphere of that time, connecting us to the felt, emotional landscape of a particular place, something a history book can never do.

Joanna Campbell’s second novel Instructions for the Working Day, published by Fairlight Books and available in hardback from August 31st, is one of these books. Set in present-day East Germany, Instructions for the Working Day not only weaves an uncomfortable, gripping story of foreboding but also leads the reader to a better understanding of the deeply felt ramifications of the post-war era of the German Democratic Republic for a whole country and its residents, the echoes of which can still be felt today.

The blurb tells us that ‘Neil Fischer is travelling from the UK to a decayed, forgotten village outside of Berlin that he has unexpectedly inherited – his father’s former hometown of Marschwald’. The village has slipped into decline since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 and Neil has visions of restoring it to its former glory. As Neil makes his way to East Germany and arrives at the village to a frosty welcome and a general sense of unease it becomes increasingly clear it may be a more difficult task than he anticipated. 

Neil strikes up a friendship with Silke, who lives with her brother Thomas in the dilapidated house where Neil is a guest during his stay in Marschwald. Silke is the only resident of the village who welcomes his arrival; it is evident that, at least to start with, Silke sees Neil as a living emblem of a better life available beyond the swampy, bleak landscape that surrounds the village. As the story unfolds we revisit Neil’s childhood and more recent life back in the UK living in the shadow of his controlling and abusive father. During his time in Germany, whilst trying to make inroads into shoring up the village’s rapid decline, Neil begins finding the missing puzzle pieces that help him put together a clearer picture of what made his father the man he was. At the same time, the buried secrets of Thomas and Silke’s lives from before the fall of the Berlin wall are also coming to light. The poisoned legacy Neil’s father has passed on to his son reveals how Neil’s life and flawed, disturbed character are just as contorted by East Germany’s dark past as those around him who lived directly through the Stasi regime, and how difficult it is for any of them to be free of its lingering shadow.

Instructions for the Working Day illustrates Campbell’s strong knowledge of the craft of prose writing. She creates a distinct sense of foreboding throughout with her use of clean, stark language and sentence structure, a certain flatness which hints at the banality of evil, as well as deftly conjuring up an atmosphere of deep rot and decay through her descriptions of the physical landscape of Marschwald and its surroundings. Part of the narrative’s beauty is how the very fabric of place and experience described in the novel manages to demonstrate how living under Stasi rule must have felt for most East Germans between 1950 and 1990. The very ground of the landscape and the story’s atmosphere shift and stifle, leaving the reader with a sense of unsteadiness underfoot, of not knowing whether to trust anything that appears solid. At the same time there is a sense of something being held back or concealed from full view that both unsettles the reader and propels you forward to want to uncover the truth. 

This is a story of trust, mistrust, shifting loyalties, and the traps we fall into when we are tempted into a false sense of security. Questions are raised about who and what we should and should not rely on, trusting the wrong people, putting blind faith in strangers, and how those who we trust the most are best positioned to cause us the most damage. Narrative truth becomes harder to pick apart from illusion as the book progresses; a building sense of the boundaries blurring between what is hallucinatory and what is a ‘real’ occurrence in the story is hinted at right from the opening chapters. Neil’s increasingly tenuous grip on reality bleeds through the pages with rapid intensity as the book progresses; there is a tangible sense of being increasingly unsure of your innate ability to work out what is real and what isn’t by the time the novel reaches its conclusion.

This is a novel that does not shy away from presenting the stark reality of the horrors we human beings are capable of inflicting upon each other, and cuts open the dark, insidious underbelly of the human psyche we often avoid acknowledging, presenting it to us in such a way that we are forced to examine it closely. Campbell fully understands that it is in these hidden corners of the human character that the answer to questions about how the Stasi regime and other cruel societal constructs are created and upheld are found. But, without falling into the trap of providing a happy ending, Campbell also provides a glimmer of hope in the closing pages of Instructions for the Working Day. It is hard fought for, but there is a redemptive arc present in one of the character’s storylines which illustrates that we also have the innate ability not to be forever scarred by the cruelties enacted upon us in the past and succumb to the fate it would seem life has presented us with. Sometimes, if we are astute and strong enough, we can claw out of the quicksand and make a grab for an opportunity to change our own endings.


Instructions for the Working Day by Joanna Campbell is currently available in hardback from Fairlight Books.

KERRY MEAD IS A BRISTOL-BASED NEW WRITER, SEASONED MOTHER, AND CURRENT STUDENT ON BIRKBECK UNIVERSITY’S CREATIVE AND CRITICAL WRITING MA. HER CREATIVE NON-FICTION HAS BEEN PUBLISHED IN MAGICAL WOMEN AND ORANGES JOURNAL. KERRY HAS WRITTEN EXTENSIVELY FOR THE EVERYDAY MAGAZINE, WHERE SHE WAS CHIEF CULTURE EDITOR UNTIL JULY 2022 AND IS CURRENTLY A MUSIC WRITER FOR GOD IS IN THE TV ZINE. FIND HER ON TWITTER AT @KERRYMEA AND AT HTTPS://ALLLIFELESSORDINARY.WORDPRESS.COM

Roman Road by Kerry Mead

‘This decaying fabric, this unknowable terrain has become my biography, the euphoria then the anguish, layers of memories colliding, splintering and reconfiguring’. 

Laura Grace Ford

 

Do ghosts exist? Yes, they do. I know this because I’m being haunted. The ghost stains the air around a stretch of pavement next to the park on Roman Road. Roman Road is in Easton, an urban neighbourhood just northeast of Bristol’s city centre. It is a short one-way street with not much going for it really; a mishmash of flats, shuttered shop fronts and graffiti. Overflowing Biffa bins and haphazardly parked delivery vans line the narrow pavements and pounding bass throbs in waves from passing cars. It’s around the corner from the golden glass dome of the Bristol Jamia Mosque, situated at the end of the recently regenerated and rebranded ‘cultural and culinary hub’ of St Mark’s Road.

St. Mark’s Church sits opposite the start of Roman Road. It was gutted and converted into sheltered housing in the 1980s, after dry rot bloomed and took over its wooden interior. The builders dug up a stash of gold coins as they excavated the foundations in 1848; three bowler hats full, apparently. It was called Roman Road because it formed part of the route between Bath and the Roman settlement of Abona, where the northwest edge of the city meets the Severn Estuary. Roman Road is a place destined to be a cut through on the way to other places. A site for secret stashes of gold to be buried and left behind.

I live just over the other side of the motorway from Easton. When the ghost started haunting me, I avoided walking along Roman Road for a while. Instead, I stuck to the logical paths through the city that guarantee an efficient passage from Place A to Place B. But that’s not how ghosts work when they haunt the city you call home. There’s no escaping them, and they can’t leave, either.

‘I read the past everywhere. It’s like an overlay to the city, two maps, two cities – past and present – and you can always switch your view, walk through the streets a ghost, with you as if you were a spectre.’

The Place of the Bridge, Jennifer Kabat

 

Bristol has been a port city ever since Abona was established. It’s a city of hills, basins, bridges and gorges built on migration, movement and slavery. Many of the neighbourhoods in Bristol are named after saints. Saint Mark, the patron saint of Venice, the labyrinthine city of marshland, lagoons, offshoots and dead ends, has his name imprinted over Easton’s streets. Water and earth rub up against each other amongst Venice’s networks of canals, bridges and squares. The footsteps of past, present and future residents overwrite each other along its walkways. All of this creates fissures and in-between spaces where ghosts can appear.

More than twelve rivers and brooks run through Bristol’s valleys to the docks, into the Severn Estuary and out to seaAs in Venice, these waterways circle around Easton and cut it off from the rest of the city. It can sometimes feel like an island. Many of the rivers have been culverted; the River Frome is one of them. It flows from its source in the Gloucestershire countryside, passes through the town I grew up in and then skirts around the edge of Easton, buried under concrete. It’s easy to forget it’s there most of the time but, even though the water is hidden, its influence can still be felt if you pause and linger. A quiet pull, a whisper.

Ghosts need straight lines to move through a place freely. Centuries ago, all over the UK, pathways called corpse roads, lych ways, coffin paths or bier roads wound and weaved their way for miles across the rural landscape. They linked villages to their parent churches and often took the most barren and remote routes. Mourners who couldn’t afford a hearse would carry their dead on foot along these designated paths to be buried. They never took a direct, logical route. Our ancestors believed that if they were straight the spirits of the dead would find their way back to haunt those left behind. They also believed ghosts couldn’t cross water. Corpse roads often cut across streams, rivers and marshland to further ensure the dead didn’t return home.

Many of the straight lines evident in Easton’s streets have been overwritten over the years. This might explain why the ghost that haunts me is stuck on that stretch of pavement next to the park on Roman Road. It’s tangled up in the rows of Victorian terraces interspersed with mid-century cul-de-sacs and tower blocks that make up the urban geography of Easton. It’s stranded on an island. It couldn’t escape even if it wanted to.

The past also teaches us that the living haunt us as well. Processions of sprites, luminescent corpse candles and wraiths were rumoured to travel along corpse roads after dark. But once a year, in April, on St Mark’s Eve, apparitions of the living, those who are destined to die during the next year, make their way from their homes to the closest burial place. In the past, villagers would gather at lych gates at midnight and wise women would watch over the corpse roads and churchyards, to see whose ghostly figure would pass.

~~~~

My steps have scored Roman Road’s paths so often that something of me must also remain for other passers-by to spot in unfocused moments. An occasional flickering glitch barely visible to the naked eye. Flesh and bones are transient, but ghosts remain to reappear again and again. I mostly drive straight through Roman Road nowadays, not leaving a mark. On my way to somewhere else in a rush, navigating the parked delivery vans or stuck behind a mum in an SUV reversing into a too-tight space, dropping her children off for gymnastics.

It’s easy to stop noticing even the most solid of things when you see them every day. In the middle of Roman Road, sandwiched between Anstey Street and Barrett Street, is a large red brick building that dominates the streets around it and houses Hawks gymnasium. I’d rarely notice it when I passed it every day. The building has lived many lives before, of both industry and dissent. Built in 1897, it was first a corset factory, then a laundry, then a storage space for engine parts used by British Aerospace. It was left empty for years until 1987, when it was squatted briefly before being gutted by a fire in 1989.

 

‘The time is out of joint’

Hamlet, William Shakespeare

 

I started noticing Hawks gym again after I had children. It has a reputation for being one of the best gymnastics centres in the Southwest; it’s probably the only reason many people from the more affluent areas of Bristol ever venture to EastonAva went to gymnastics there when she was six or so, but stopped after a term: ‘It’s too boring Mummy, we repeat the same things again and again.’ I secretly felt proud of her rebellious, independent streak. To be honest, I was also relieved not to have to drag myself out of the house early on a weekend anymore. Every Saturday morning, I’d peel myself out of bed and pile Ava and Joe into the car, both sullen and complaining, before driving over to Easton.

In my memory, every one of those mornings was grey and wind whipped, dragging Joe and Ava through the park opposite Hawks by the arms of their coats, their sulky bunched-up fists wet and cold. Head down, red wine hangover stinging my synapses, horizontal rain bursts slapping my face. Crossing the road, running up the steps, ushering Ava into the fusty, crowded reception. Since then, sometimes when I’m passing, I catch a flash of my back pounding up the steps to the entrance, Ava’s chubby fist in my hand. I am rubbing shoulders with the fainter ghosts of the corset factory and laundry workers pouring out of the double doors at the end of the day. Mothers rushing somewhere they don’t want to be, gymnasts’ feet hitting the mats in the same spot over and over, the clack clack clack of rows of sewing machines.

Hawks gym is clearly visible from the M32 motorway, a swath of Brutalism that sweeps past Easton, elevated on concrete pillars. It provides a constant background roar of traffic; the sound that has lulled my children to sleep since I moved back to the area in 2013. Work began on the motorway in 1966, a safe distance away from the gentle crescents of Angela Carter’s bohemian Clifton. The M32’s construction embodied the promise of a new, more dynamic future for Bristol. It cleaved through the streets of Victorian terraces which housed the city’s workers, rupturing the green parks and cutting Easton off from the rest of the cityThe route planned for the motorway intersected with the River Frome just upstream of Easton, so the river was redirected and culverted as it passed Easton’s western edge. The river’s natural course through the city has been altered and forced underground so many times it no longer flows freely. There is a cycle track you can take from Easton to the city centre that follows the motorway, a short corridor of grass, tarmac and graffiti. If you walk along the path and look closely you can catch glimpses of the river stagnating in the dark through metal grilles set in the concrete.

~~~~~

Opposite Hawks gym is a rank of shops. There’s Pak’s Butchers and Star Cash and Carry with its silver bowls of bruised fruit on display outside. Above the cash and carry, a small flat with a grubby closed-eye window remains unchanged since Katie lived there during the long, stifling summer of 1995. We’d both just moved to Bristol and I’d walk there some evenings from my house on Easton Road. We’d smoke a joint with her flatmate, and when we got bored she’d pull her trainers on and we’d run to the pub giggling, Katie still wearing her pyjamas. We’d pool our change on the bar for a pint each; nineteen and fearless. I often think about Katie and her flatmate when I walk along Roman Road. He ended up on smack; I wonder if he got clean.

Two doors down, on the corner opposite St. Mark’s church, is No.12, the new cafe that opened a few years ago. It’s conspicuous in its sophisticated blandness, like it’s been ripped out of a Sunday supplement and pasted over the takeaway that used to be there. Remains of the building’s previous life are still visible if you know what to look for, like a palimpsest. You can see it in a flake of white masonry paint above the new fascia revealing where grey stone used to be. Or in the long, low sill that still runs along the large windows, where a row of people would perch every evening, waiting for their orders of pizza or kebabs. Windows dripping condensation, softening the harsh strip light glitch and buzz inside.

The first time I sat in the courtyard of No. 12, it had already been open for four years. It was a hot, bright Saturday morning in 2018, the summer after I met O. He’d visit most weekends and I’d sometimes meet him off the train at the station opposite St Mark’s church. That day I’d got there early so I was killing time. I sat listening to the coffee machine puffing and screeching inside, nondescript electronica floating through the air. At that moment the café felt flat and calcified; nothing left to be added to its serene occupancy. In direct contrast, the street outside was a constant overwriting of footsteps and noise; the rich busyness and unfolding of an always shifting and building geography. I remember feeling suddenly complicit in the othering of the Easton on the other side of the courtyard’s high whitewashed walls, just by being there doing nothing with my expensive cappuccino. I quickly drained my cup, returned my book to my bag and stepped back out onto Roman Road.

I walked the long way to the train station instead, past the shops and through the summer-humming park. Before the park, unseen behind bricked up ghost doorways, are the backyards of a row of fixed up cottages. Their front doors face onto Albion Road, which runs parallel to Roman Road, like they are politely turning their backs on it. My friend Greg bought the middle cottage for £26,000 in 1999. I rented a room there for a couple of years not long after. A mossy red brick path weaving through tangles of jasmine and green led to the front door. Inside, the rooms were covered in wall hangings and full of cheap furniture, and on weekend mornings empty bottles and overflowing ashtrays left from an after-party the night before. Greg and my close friend Helen, now his wife, lived there until recently with their two boys. They sold the house for £399,000.

~~~~~

You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming.’

For the Sake of a Single Poem, Rainer Rilke

 

My old bedroom window looks out over the high wall onto Hawks gym, and I always glance up at it when I’m passing, but the blinds are usually down. I remember telling O they were happy times living there when we passed one time and paused by the peeling green park railings to look up at the window, but now I’m not so sure. Too many sleepless nights, whether drug or anxiety induced. Too many people passing through, not enough time spent still.

One scene comes to mind looking up at the window. I am lying on my side in bed propped up on my elbow on a dull, white-skied Sunday afternoon, with last night’s makeup still on. I’m watching a film and passing a joint back and forth with Louie, who is sat leaning against the wall on the other side of the bed. The smoke curling and mugs of hot, milky tea soften the jagged edges of our hangovers. Then the sound of drumming starts drifting up from the street outside. We both get up to look out of the window in time to see a procession passing along Roman RoadA joyful, proud collective heading from the Sikh temple on nearby Colston Road dressed like jewels. The men and boys wearing white kurtas, orange turbans and elaborately patterned coats, the elders at the front carrying blue and orange flags, the younger drummers jostling behind. The procession briefly fills the road and pavements. They are gone in a minute or so, heading in the direction of St Marks Road, leaving nothing behind except the fading sound of drums. I pop my head out of the window to try and follow their route, then I ease the sash window back down and we return to the TV. Louie moves closer, wrapping his arm around me, squeezing my shoulder and settling in next to me.

When I think about living there I also think about the black cat. Sometimes I’d feel a hint of soft fur sweeping across the back of my calves as I ran up the stairs, or I’d catch a glimpse of a black cat’s tail curling around the corner at the bottom of the stairwell as I walked back down. It happened enough times that I started to believe in ghosts. We didn’t have a cat until two or three weeks before I moved out. A stray tortoiseshell cat had turned up out of nowhere one day and would sit motionless for hours on the red brick garden path, staring at the house with intense yellow-green eyes. One day she strode into the kitchen as if she had never belonged anywhere else.

In another scene, I’m lying in bed again, but this time it’s late at night; one of the last nights I spent living in Easton. I’m in bed with the stray cat, who jumped in and curled up next to me a few minutes before, lapping her rough tongue over the back of my still hand.  I’m staring out of the window at the streetlight outside Hawks, half-packed boxes surrounding me.  It is silent and the height of summer. I don’t want to move out of the cottage anymore, but I’ve accidentally made myself homeless. I was meant to be moving to London to live with Louie. Greg had already found a replacement tenant, who was moving into the room in a week’s time. Louie had rung me a couple of days before to announce that he didn’t think me moving in was the best idea anymore.

I decided to take the stray cat with me a week later when I moved into the flat I’d found at the last minute. It had newly painted white walls and pristine polished wooden floors and was on a leafy, quiet street two miles away, on the other side of the M32. It was called a clean slate. When I moved there, the quiet sometimes deafened me, but the cat filled the silence with her warm weight across my feet at night and loud miaows at the door during the day. As I unpacked boxes and filled kitchen cupboards, I made myself a promise that, from then on, I would stop believing in anything that didn’t seem completely solid. The cat disappeared a few weeks later. I was inconsolable, but still couldn’t see the absurdity of the promise I’d made to myself.

~~~

Like the pulse of a perfect heart, life struck straight through the streets.’

Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

 

From the first time he came here in 2017, O seemed like he was sucking the streets dry; collecting the sights, sounds and contours of the city, then storing them away in a private, locked collection. He didn’t want to go for walks through nature reserves and parks on Sundays. Instead, he preferred to traverse the underpasses and back streets, scoring a line past the skatepark under the M32 with its sunken, burst sofas and upturned bins. Sometimes I’d wake on a Sunday morning and he would already be sat on the edge of the bed pulling his socks on: ‘I’m popping out for a quick walk’. We’d walk most Saturday nights as well, me talking, him listening, moving between gigs, friends’ houses, clubs and bars. When I walked with him Bristol felt like a new city. His presence breathed life into the tired streets.

A few months before I last saw O, he messaged me on a Wednesday afternoon to tell me he was coming to Bristol after work and would get the last train home.  It was unusual for him to visit during the week, but he told me he was bored and fancied the trip. All I heard was that he missed me. I rang around for a babysitter and met him in the pub by the station where Katie and I used to go. We sat in the beer garden wrapped in big coats under fairy light garlands and rolled cigarettes in gentle silence and smiles.

After a while we decided to head to Ricardo’s who lived a few streets away. Roman Road was unusually still, bathed in orange light, April sky full of stars. Past No. 12 and Pak’s, past Katie’s grubby closed-eye window, past the bricked-up doorway and closed blinds of Greg and Helen’s. As we walked alongside the park, he stopped in that spot and pulled me close and kissed me out of nowhere. We rarely kissed in public. We kissed for a long time, me marvelling at his solidity, his here-ness, then I pulled back laughing:

‘What are we? Teenagers?’

He laughed as well and pulled me back into him tightly and kissed me again:

‘I just can’t let go’.

We carried on walking, wrapped up in each other, paying no attention to the streets. Later, on the last train home, he messaged me with links to one-bedroom flats in Bristol on Rightmove. All I heard was that he wanted to stay.

~~~~

When O first left, his ghost haunted my house. Over time, it appeared less and less; the frequent apparitions slowly written over by the constant traffic of domesticity. New memories are painted over the old. But all ghosts reveal themselves occasionally; they can never be fully deleted if you know what was there before. Occasionally O’s frame would flicker at the kitchen table in the corner of my vision when I was draining pasta at the sink and a song he loved came on the radio. Or sometimes as I woke and opened my eyes, especially on bright, crisp, winter mornings, a long, freckled back might materialise on the edge of my bed, caught in time pulling on a sock again and again. These ghosts always disappeared when I turned to them, with my mouth full of unanswered questions.

Although the traces were faint and glitchy at home, there was still a ghost’s stain that was vivid, trapped over the other side of the river. Shortly after O left, we entered the first 2020 lockdown. I would sometimes drive through Easton and in my memory the same thing happens each time. I see myself rounding the corner past the church and No.12. There is a white delivery van stopped with its hazard lights on outside Pak’s, the open tailgate door showing skinned carcasses hanging from hooks inside, staring blindly from clouded eyes, the driver nowhere in sight. I stop and drum my fingers on the steering wheel whilst I wait, sometimes for so long I end up turning the engine off. Cars start pulling up behind me, beeping impatiently. Reggae is blaring from somewhere. I see an old man in a long white kurta and topi feeding the pigeons in the park. My eyes, against my will, are pulled to that stretch of pavement and railings that separate the park from the road. That’s where the ghost is, entangled with the street’s tarmac and airA stratum usually concealed from view. A garland of orange marigolds slung over the railings appears for a second before disappearing. A glitch; a symbol of union and mutual trust marking a sacred spot. Or an offering slung over a portrait of the dead. A point of access shimmering between presence and absence. I wince and turn away and look over towards the gym. Eventually, the butcher in his blood-stained white overalls lumbers into view, pushing a supermarket trolley. He is following the delivery driver, who is on his phone, and slowly starts unloading. When he has finished, the driver jumps back in the van and starts up the engine. As the road clears, I exhale, relieved, and pull away.

~~~~ 

Beneath all the cities we don’t recognise are stacked all of the cities we do.

Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London

 

At the start of the millennium, just before I Iived in the cottage on Albion Road, I lived in Barcelona for a short time. When I arrived, the city was laid out before me unspoiled. No layers of memories, no roots from which to untangle my feet. For most of my time there I walked. Like O, I wanted to suck the streets dry. I walked like a tourist who wants to take the essence of the city home as a souvenir, from the port and beaches next to the old city across to the very top of Montjuic. I walked between cafes and galleries, through secret, crumbling squares. I listened to the echoes of my footsteps in knotted networks of narrow, gothic alleyways that the midday sun never reached. I stopped to watch locals parading dead-eyed, jewel-coloured papier-mache Gegants on sombre, grey Sunday mornings. I walked alone along the wide, crowded thoroughfares that cut through the city, rain showers briefly slicking the pavements before evaporating. I’d inhale Barcelona’s heady, sweat-spiked petrichor deeply, marvelling that I’d never smelt anything quite like it, knowing deep down I never would again. I fell in love with a city.

Then, after a while, I started walking out of loneliness. The people I crossed paths with felt distant and unreachable. As I sunk deeper into depression, the actual bones of the place felt increasingly threatening and the people in it casually cruel. I started resenting the city and everyone in it. One evening I mapped the streets of the barrio around where I lived in looping, unravelling circles for hours. My restless steps echoed the heavy agitation I felt running through my arteries. I couldn’t stop but I didn’t know what I was looking for. I was unable to return to my flat, turn the key in the door and admit the affair was over.

After that night I left as soon as I could. 

~~~~

I returned a year later with Louie, a few months after we first met. I felt the urge to revisit and forcibly overwrite my complicated memories with new, simpler ones. We stayed a few streets away from my old flat in a grandiose but down-at-heel pensión filled with huge blooming succulents. We gorged on expensive food and I fucked him noisily day and night. We drank cocktails in bars hidden from the street behind heavy velvet curtains until we stumbled home through the gothic quarter in the early hours. I didn’t tell him, but as we walked I was searching the streets for traces of what I’d felt when I’d inhaled Barcelona’s after-rain smell. But I couldn’t find it. Nor could I fully exorcise my ghosts.

~~~~~

‘Find a way out | Through a memorial garden | A wilderness of roses.

Savage Messiah, Laura Grace Ford

 

Not long ago, I found myself walking back along Roman Road on a steely grey February afternoon. Life had shrunk since mine and O’s Saturday night wanders had ended. For the last ten months, I’d stuck to walking the same established paths during our allotted hour a day of outdoor exercise. In the depths of the first lockdown, I’d walk with Joe and Ava up to Stoke Park along the pathway that climbed through the woods behind our house. As we reached the top of the hill, we’d stop and look out over the city spread before us, pointing in wonder at the empty motorway gliding silently past below, high above the roofs of Easton and St Pauls.

When I find myself walking through Easton again, it feels freeing to cut through the city streets on foot once more. As Hawks gym and the peeling green railings of the park come into sight, instead of following the logical, more direct route home, I change direction and walk along Roman Road. I want to know if the ghost is real or is just a by-product of malignant nostalgia left to grow unchecked throughout the lockdowns. I want to see if the garland of marigolds is still there or if it was just refracted light bouncing off my windscreen.

Just before Hawks gym, I reach Paradise Fashions, which has had its shutters down for as long as I can remember. I cross the road and walk slowly along the pavement. A gaunt man in a shiny black Adidas tracksuit sits on the park bench cradling a can of Red Stripe. His gaze is fixed in the direction I am walking from, but he seems to stare straight through me. I don’t see the garland of marigolds as I approach but I can tell as soon as I stop that the ghost is there. I sense it as a swirl of solid, dark energy and hear it as a crystalline snatch of song suspended in a cold April starry sky. A corpse candle halted, flickering mid-air. The ghost still feels brand new, and as gentle and kind as silent smiles in a pub garden, but it also feels raw, and as cruel and shocking as fresh grief. The spectre of an imagined future that failed to materialise. Caught in the city’s in-between spaces, unable to extricate itself from its surroundings. No one else knows it’s there, but it’s now as much a part of Roman Road’s geography as its bricked-up doorways, concrete, grass and air. I hurry away, paying no attention to my surroundings. Past the back of the row of cottages, past Katie’s window, past the rank of shops. A young boy of around ten or eleven comes out of Star Cash and Carry as I pass; I almost bump into him and have to step aside to let him by. He stops to tip a plastic tub of food scraps onto a knotted black bin bag resting on the curbside. His stare makes me feel like an outsider. I follow behind him as he turns and walks back through the shop door.

I decide to return a few weeks later and I swear the man in the Adidas tracksuit is sitting on the park bench again, but the ghost is very faint this time. The marigolds have yet to reappear, although I know they are still there.  The ghost and the marigolds are as solid as chubby fists in my hand, the turn of a key in a lock, a black cat’s tail, a river running under concrete. The marigolds remain there somewhere, buried like a stash of gold coins waiting to be dug up in the future.

 

KERRY MEAD IS A BRISTOL-BASED NEW WRITER, SEASONED MOTHER, AND CURRENT STUDENT ON BIRKBECK UNIVERSITY’S CREATIVE AND CRITICAL WRITING MA. HER CREATIVE NON-FICTION HAS BEEN PUBLISHED IN MAGICAL WOMEN. KERRY HAS WRITTEN EXTENSIVELY FOR THE EVERYDAY MAGAZINE, WHERE SHE WAS CHIEF CULTURE EDITOR UNTIL JULY 2022 AND IS CURRENTLY A MUSIC WRITER FOR GOD IS IN THE TV ZINE. FIND HER ON TWITTER AT @KERRYMEA AND AT HTTPS://ALLLIFELESSORDINARY.WORDPRESS.COM

The Burden of Guilt by Emma Werner

My little sister Flora is two and a half. She collects chestnuts and pinecones in a small metal box. She stops on walks to smell the flowers as I lean to keep hold of her hand and the greatest problem she has ever solved: a 16-piece puzzle. She is a toddler, and if my biased opinion is to be trusted, a particularly sweet one at that. She is also the same age I was when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Insidious thing, cancer. I often thought of it as a completely separate entity from my mum. The uninvited third wheel in our mother-daughter relationship. But malignant tumours arise from our own cells, so in that sense, my mother’s cancer was her. I was once told to consider the disease as a Darwinian process; species evolve by mutations and natural selection across entire populations, and so do cancer cells within each individual. Malignancy is the inevitable cost of our existence as multicellular beings. In the case of my mother, she was in her early thirties when the unwanted bill came. She had no genetic predisposition, no family history; the chances of her getting sick were laughably small. But the cancer grew anyway, and with it, an unnamed bulk of guilt and responsibility crawled onto my small back. I have flashes of her skinny figure in a vast double bed taller than myself. I doubt I understood what was happening then, but I know she underwent surgery and chemotherapy early on. The cancer hid for a while, then in 1999, it came again, this time grafting itself onto her right hip. With the benefit of hindsight and many years of biomedical studies, I now know this was the beginning of the end – once the cancer reaches the bone, there is no way to remove it. From then on, my mother’s condition was, plainly, incurable. I have no recollection of being explicitly told this, not then anyway. Any mention of Darwin and oncogenic mutations did not reach me until much later in life. But her first relapse remains brutally etched into my memory.

During the Christmas break of that year and amid a vicious round of chemotherapy, my parents took my sister and me to a ski resort. I was five; my sister was eight. Much of that holiday is a blur – and hard as I try to recall, I do not believe I was aware of the full extent of my mother’s disease. Shortly after we arrived, she fell sick and was rushed to a doctor nearby. When she returned the following night, it dawned on me for the first time in my life: one day, my parents would die, and I would be alone. I rushed to my mother for comfort. She calmed me down and said not to worry and to enjoy the rest of the holiday. But a few days later, on New Year’s Eve, while I was jumping around to songs I didn’t really know, thoughts of my mother’s health came back to haunt me, mingled with a dull feeling I could not quite yet put words on. As the millennium drew to a close, I was joined by a shadow that would stalk me for the rest of my life.

The thought that I’d burdened my mother with my own fears was mortifying; what pain she must have felt, knowing the cancer was killing her even as she consoled me. I never mentioned the incident again. Instead, I quietly carried the shame of what I considered my failure to deal with my mother’s terminal illness without causing a scene. And as the cancer cells continued to slowly but inexorably multiply inside of her, so did my own feelings of guilt. 

For the twelve years that followed, the cancer lived with us like an unwanted family guest we all did our best to ignore. Occasionally, it disappeared for a while before storming back in, each remission shorter than the last. The cycle became so familiar that I fooled myself into thinking it would carry on forever. I went about my life as normally as I could. I went to school, sang in a choir, took violin lessons, and convinced myself that things would get better eventually. Yet, at times, the horrors of my reality burst through that naive ignorance, just as they had in 1999.

When I was around twelve, my mother lost her hair. It had happened before several times, but her most recent chemotherapies had spared her this characteristic side-effect and I had almost forgotten what she looked like bald. I was the only one home when she came from the hairdresser, where she’d said goodbye to the last remaining clumps of hair not yet ravaged by the medication. I assured her she looked great, that her new black chemo hat was sweet and that we’d find a good wig anyway but was unable to mask my reaction upon seeing her. She looked so pale. So ill. All I could see was her cancer. I knew how upset she was at losing her hair again and hated myself for hating her appearance and for the half-second in which I feared the shock had been visible in my eyes.

While writing this piece, I found an email I’d sent that same year to a teen magazine in response to a story about cancer they had recently published. Written in Comic Sans and signed off with a smiley face – my attempt to lighten the mood – the message read:

“My mother has had cancer since I was two years old. I have learnt to live with it, but the older I get, the harder I find it. I am unable to talk about it with my mother, nor my family, nor a psychologist nor my friends. How can I make it easier and help my mother?”

🙂 Emma, 12 (Paris)

I received a very kind email back five days later. The editor suggested I look to artistic outlets as a coping mechanism: “drawing, writing.” As it turns out, I had spent most of my childhood writing. Short poems, mainly, though I ventured into other genres too. At primary school, I’d penned a small pamphlet in which I examined the meaning of words. In suitably morbid fashion, the first one on the list was death. I wonder what my parents made of it. 

When I was fourteen, my mother once asked me to pick up the blood test results for her, too anxious to see what they might show. Unfolding the piece of paper in the laboratory’s drab waiting room, I broke down. I willed the numbers to change, but her illness’s stubborn un-solvability stared back at me from the page. I called my father in tears. After all the pain and the treatments, how could I possibly tell her she was still dying? In the end, it was she who had to comfort me. Here I was, five years old again, unable to cope and unable to make her better. “So it’s not so good, is it?” she said as I opened the front door. “It’s ok, the doctor said the markers might continue going up for a bit.” 

I went on a trip with my conservatoire orchestra a month before her death. In hindsight, I should have known that time was fast running out when cancerous nodules were found in her liver not long before. Still, celebrating Halloween in various bars of Vienna, the cancer seemed far away. And nothing quite takes your mind off impending death like a week of underage drinking and sleep-deprived performances of Verdi’s Requiem. Reality came crashing down the same hour I got back. My father came to pick me up from the coach station on the way to collect my mother up from a therapist appointment. She climbed into the car and burst into tears. “I am not afraid anymore,” she told my dad. It wasn’t until two weeks later, when my father sent me to stay with my grandparents to shield me from the excruciating final moments, that I understood what she had meant. We had finally reached the end. After fourteen years of a life-threatening illness, I still failed to recognise death when it came.

For a long time after her passing, I dreamt about her often and every time the same scenario would play out. I would see her on a Metro platform in Montparnasse, near our flat in Paris, and I would apologise for not realising early enough that she was about to die. My mother was gone, but my guilt remained.

I found solace in biology textbooks in the gaping hole she left behind. I relished learning anything to do with cancer. I sought any mentions of the chemotherapy drugs I had seen my mother endure. Taxol. Taxotere. Any mutations I remembered hearing about. HERC2. BRCA1. “Bones are the most common metastatic site for breast cancer”. “Secondary liver tumours develop in about half of all metastatic breast cancers and often lead to liver failure”. Rather than finding it upsetting, it was like a comforting voice making sense of it all. Here for the first time was a logical justification for my illogical childhood, a coherent explanation of my mother’s illness. 

Biology gave me another, more unexpected source of healing. The same year my mother died, I took an internship at a laboratory researching cancer in Tasmanian Devils. There, I first learnt about malignant tumours in the context of evolutionary theories. The scientist who supervised me called them “biological dead-ends” – once the cancer becomes stronger than its host, it dies with them, just like my mother’s cancer had disappeared with her. In the following months, that same scientist met my dad, who’d wanted to thank her for taking good care of me. They married some years later. And so, in a strange turn of events, after cancer took my mother, it gave me a younger sister, Flora.

It has been eleven years since my childhood fear of losing a parent came to pass. My own thirties are looming large on the horizon. On the other hand, Flora is looking forward to her third-ever Christmas. A few weeks ago, she became inconsolable after breaking a small plate, and as I comforted her, I saw my childhood expectations crumble too. I had always believed it a perfectly reasonable assumption that I should know to deal calmly with my mother’s illness before I had even learnt how to read. All those failures I’d been carrying around since I was Flora’s age, my remorse, my guilt – it was justified. Now, faced with the reality of a toddler’s emotional landscape, I realised for the first time the sad absurdity of it all. 

It took over a decade and the arrival of Flora into my life to reach that basic conclusion. Sometimes in her eyes, I recognise the same carefree innocence I traded as a child for a lifetime of self-reproach. I cannot change how I grew up, nor, as I assured my mother on her deathbed and many times in dreams, would I have wanted to. But as I watch Flora play with her toys and cry over broken crockery, the burden of guilt medical textbooks never quite managed to shift slowly makes way for bittersweet relief. I was a kid who did not know how young she was. I did my best in the worst of scenarios; one day, I will accept that that was enough.

Emma Werner is a creative producer and writer, living in South London. She also holds a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Cambridge. She is originally from Paris, and enjoys writing in both English and French.

Where there’s bread is my country By Christina Carè

It all started yesterday, with the burning. 

Smoke rose in great plumes overhead as the men took to the fields with torches. They tied handkerchiefs over noses and lips; sweat rained down from their foreheads. Afterwards, they washed ash from their eyelashes and inside their ears. Sweetness and smoke filled their nostrils. 

This, the great state of Queensland, where plenty of land means plenty of space to grow the sweet crop. Wind whistles through bright emerald stems; cicadas and crickets hum out of sync. But the machetes sing in unison. Nature is flattened here, subjugated by sweat and blood, soil honeyed with corpses. The land fights back with clouds of beetles, moths, mozzies, and a heat that cuts the throat. If he can endure it, a man can start again with a few good years in the fields. A man can cut his way into a life of his own dreaming. Someday, Big John thinks, but not yet. 

He rings the bell at sunrise, hard as his stiff joints allow. Their shed, red brick and rusted iron overhead, has only one window – a hole, with netting nailed into each corner. Out of hammocks drop five bronzed bodies: taut muscle, callused hands. Jamie, Mikey, Davo, Little John and their foreigner, Jakob. They yawn, stretch, and fill their water bladders before slinging them round their shoulders. George – the old man who helps out – slops six giant spoons of porridge into six enamel plates. Big John says grace, got to maintain dignity, before they shovel oats in, unseeing. The cane awaits them. 

Yesterday’s blisters have popped and shrivelled into flat spongy skin; the men piss on their own hands to keep them rough enough to wield the blade. They’re real blokes.

‘Cutting the new field today,’ Big John says, ‘Get ready, boys.’

They jump on their bikes – rickety, tire treads plugged with stones – their hat strings tied tight under their chins. Cool rushes of wind soothe already sweating armpits and groins, the only moment of comfort in a long day ahead. The swell in the air should break soon, they hope. But nobody dares complain. 

From afar, the woody stems look like soft green grass from the mother country. Wrong shade, but slender and inviting all the same. The men are above temptation, though. They know she’s a false friend. She doesn’t give up her sugar easy. They steady themselves.

Today, charred strands sit ready for the cut, embers cooled overnight. A man can earn twice as much from the cut of unburnt cane, but they won’t risk the vermin. 

‘Easier this way,’ Big John says, ‘Only the kanakas, that lot, did different.’ 

Not Big John’s lads. Free men make choices. 

The men collect their weapons from the truck, each his own favourite. A broad flat blade with a hooked flick to one side. Theirs are bare hands, flimsy against a crop that doesn’t die in fire. Still, gloves are for sissies. They begin: Stoop. Chop. Straighten. Top. 

There’s as much water as a man can drink but they know better than to stop too long; every piss will cost you. Stoop. Chop. Straighten. Top. It goes on until the worst hours, when the sun pulses vengeful over them. The air itself needs cutting then, and when their smallest, Jamie, looks ready to pass clean out, Big John finally puts his blackened fingers in his mouth and whistles. The heat has dried their sweaty shirts stiff. On their bikes, the metal scalds their skin. They retreat back to the shed.

Off come shirts and trousers into the trough out front; can’t bring any of it inside. George starts the wash. Twice a day they work them, scrubbing charcoal clean from the linen. The men fall naked into their hammocks again, napping till the day eases.

The bell comes too quick – time already to collect their pickings. Swinging great stalks onto the truck, taking turns until the first bleeding of sunset. Stoop. Chop. Straighten. Top. Toss her on the truck, tie her down steady. 

When they’re done, it’s a clean bald patch on the crown of the earth.

On Friday, Big John takes the boys for a cold one or six. They crash glasses, gulp it down. Pleased with his lads, he finally notices: One is missing.

‘Where’s that Jamie, then?’ Big John asks. They look at their feet. 

Jakob answers, ‘Gone, John. Back to Sydney.’ Jamie slipped away while the men slept.

‘Bloody oath, these Sydney bludgers,’ Big John looks across the room; them foreign blokes are sitting together, talking too loud in another tongue. ‘Need least five of youse come Monday. Anyone know a man keen for some hard yakka?’

Nobody answers. They drink on, light dipping, moths taking their shift from the day’s flies. Only when Big John’s had a few more does Jakob say into his ear, ‘I know a man, Big John, he works good. Pietro. Just off the Jumna in Townsville.’

Big John looks at the noisy wogs and sighs. Here we go again. Didn’t want a Fritz like Jakob at first, but said yes anyway. The lads keep drinking and laughing, oblivious. 

He already knows. He’s got to get his priorities straight. He must keep the gang earning.

 

On Monday, it’s arranged. Outside their shed waits a small, sturdy fellow, dark hair carefully combed behind his ears. Hands together, clasping his hat. He’s dressed in tight-laced leather shoes; been a while since Big John saw the like. He does his best to ignore the shoes, coming out with a big swinging handshake: ‘How’s it goin’, mate?’ Pietro looks like a child when he smiles. ‘Did ya bring ya work clothes with ya?’

Pietro looks confused, tugs at his own shirt and says, ‘My clothes.’ He follows Big John inside. 

‘Bit hot for it, mate.’ Big John mimes fanning himself but gets no reply. 

The lads are at breakfast; Jakob and Pietro shake hands, exchanging a kiss on the cheek. Spoons halt halfway to mouths. Silence descends over the chatty lads. Big John gives the room a hard look: don’t say a bloody thing. Soon as Jakob shows Pietro to his bed, they all start hooting. Bloody pooftas!

Big John watches sidelong as Pietro throws down his jacket, rolls up his shirt sleeves, pulls his tie loose, buries it in a pocket. Jakob lends him shoes for the job; Pietro tucks his own neatly away. He looks a wuss, Big John thinks, but Pietro gets his hat on and follows them out, smile never fading.

At the field, Big John says, ‘Pick your weapon, son.’ The machetes are wedged upright in the dry soil. Pietro doesn’t ask for gloves.

Stoop. Chop. Straighten. Top.

It’s an unnatural movement, sure enough, and Pietro only cuts down about five tonnes that day, while Jakob cuts down twelve. Big John still slaps Pietro on the back, ‘Not bad for day one, mate.’ Pietro tucks his bleeding hands into his pockets. ‘That’s the way,’ Big John says, and makes sure the lad gets fed. 

After a week, over yet another dinner of potatoes and gravy, Pietro says: ‘I cook.’ 

George shrugs, but Big John freezes. Pietro reassures him: ‘Good food.’ 

Big John feigns ease, can’t let the others see him panic. 

‘Alright then, mate,’ he says, but if he’s still hungry tomorrow, the man’s a goner.

He steps outside their shed for a ciggie while the men go down to nap, and sees the little man hurry out to huddle with others of his sort from nearby sheds, their tin roofs sparking in the sun from afar. They’re animated, exchanging rich red tomatoes and odd shapes in linen pouches. The chatting goes on too long. Planning to jump ship? Looking for another shed? He can’t afford it; he waves Pietro over.

And the little guy comes, hauling his sack, the hessian frayed at its edges. He’s oblivious to concern, still grinning like a fool; he disappears into their makeshift kitchen. Old George is out cold, snoring from the swing-seat on the porch.

The kitchen is a clanging symphony, but it won’t disturb the cutters, tired from another day on the field. Only when Big John rings the bell in their ears, do the bodies shift. They sniff to find the air filled with the scent of bread baked hot and meat stewed in a mix of spices they cannot place. It’s strange, but it smells edible, Big John thinks, as the lads settle into their places.

Pietro works the ladle quick, pot to plate. Their stomachs groan in answer. Big John starts, ‘Our Father…But the smell just gets better and better. He holds up his hands and says, ‘Let’s eat, boys.’ The men go fast, devouring meat, vegetables, sauce. 

They see Pietro sopping up the red from his plate with a crust and he says, ‘La scarpetta. Little shoe.’ They have no idea what he means, but they copy him, and soon the bread is all gone. They clank spoons, lick plates clean. 

They sit back and smile.

At the end of the working week, Big John gets the paper. The headline reads, ‘Olive-skinned invasion’. He tosses it aside.

In the afternoon, the rains come at long last. Heavy sky erupts with thick drops, turning every hard surface into song. The men stop their game of cricket, whooping, shirts soaked against their skin in seconds. There’s not much warning that far north.

Pietro and Jakob are not with them. 

At dinner, Mikey asks, ‘Them wogs already gone, Big John?’ He frowns at the gravy slop being ladled into his plate.

‘Looks like it,’ he says. They are wogs, after all. With-Out-Guarantee.

But the men do appear, and they’ve got another. An even smaller man, curly black hair glistening in the downpour. 

‘This Marco,’ Pietro says, and Big John huffs. ‘He work, good worker.’

Big John eyes him up. ‘No space for more of yas.’ 

It’s a lie. Since they outlawed blackbirding – the islanders sent back to their own lands, freed men – there’d always been a lack. A need for more hands. He could take this fella, or he could always end up taking one of the blackfellas sitting by the side of the road, their faces drawn and distant. He weighs it up. More hands means more cane, means more cash. 

The new man says, ‘I cook for you.’

They hook another hammock into the back room. That night, they eat macaroni for the first time.

After dinner, Big John lays down the law early: ‘None of that kissing business, got it?’ The new men start to talk in their musical tongue, and he gives them a glare. They stop, push forward a plate of dark salty meat cut into neat circles. Big John takes a bite. 

 

The men work until their backs groan; build up blisters, let them break, reeking piss and sweat and flies all day, bodies stained in charcoal. When the field is done, they watch the truck go with the glow of satisfaction. One more bit of earth beaten. 

Another field waits down the way. 

His men, Mikey and Davo, leave for easier, cleaner work down south. Instead he has Roberto, Marco, Francesco, Pietro, Jakob and Little John. Each man picks his blade. They cut into the sunset. They clink glasses, filled with ruby wine instead of tea. They cut, they load, they clear.

The wogs start their own shops, selling those meats wrapped in white skins. Big John knows he likes the finocchiona best, the sharp fennel an unexpected pleasure. And for the bread, crusty brown and salty on the tongue, Big John is especially pleased.  

War comes. Willing men can still fight for the King; Big John would rather see his face on a neat pile of notes in his coffer. His voice was only just breaking when men fought on those Turkish shores – grew into manhood on stories of that baptism of fire. A nation of real blokes was born. At memorials for Gallipoli, Big John will tip his hat. Show respect with silence. But to those stories, he now pays no heed. 

His paper reads: ‘Enemy aliens to be interned.’ He tosses it aside. 

‘Whadya make of this Hitler, Jakob?’

Jakob only shrugs.

True Aussies don’t crave great men. After all: what’s in it for them? All that marching and saluting; Big John doesn’t get it. Got enough to do, right here. 

He doesn’t hear the truck rattle up the red road. Too busy eating stewed rabbit and spaghetti. Big John’s slurping when they kick the door in. 

The coppers must drag Jakob out; he’s strong from the cane. Twisting his arms into the shackles, he’s ready to tear a throat with his teeth. 

Big John tries to argue, kicks up the dust outside. But it’s too late, they tell him. Jakob will sit on his hands until the war is over. ‘We’ll be back for youse next,’ one copper points at the shadowed faces within. Big John only growls. It is his colony still, he thinks. 

‘Pay that moron no mind, gents,’ he says, uncertain. 

But he is not the governor-general. The coppers wait until the napping hour, Big John bleary-eyed and slow. The gang of seven becomes two. 

Little John must find another shed; Big John must pack up his swag at last. Not much to it. He says goodbye to old George, who clung to the cane longer than all the rest, but now must stay with family back up in Cairns. All those years they survived that land, but you can’t work land without men. Even the blacks are being dragged to the front lines, Big John reads. They can’t vote, but they can fight, it seems. Meanwhile, his gang are off to rot. Who’s left to argue with?

At the train station, he looks back through the heat’s refraction, the swell in the air fit to rupture. The cane waves goodbye in the afternoon breeze, wind picking up from the east. He knows tonight the rains will come again. It would have been a great day for the cut tomorrow; after the shower, the land softens, just for a moment. He watches the women trading smoked meats from their carts, the few remaining blackfellas standing silent and watchful by the fence. A truck full of men passes by. He holds up a hand; their gloomy eyes meet his. They could be his men, the ones with thickened palms, who he taught to cut clean. 

In Brisbane, the newspaperman is keen for a word with a real white cutter from Innisfail. Here’s his chance, he thinks. Set the record straight. 

The newspaperman says, ‘Cane industry’s losing men, momentum, losing steam in this war. Whadya reckon?’

‘Which war’s that?’ Big John asks. The newspaperman looks at him funny. 

‘The big one, mate. We’re fighting them at home and abroad, yeah?’

‘Are we?’ Big John says, looks down at where the calluses trace ridged peaks into his skin. Where missed strokes sliced white rivers between knuckles. ‘Not out there. Out there, we’re mates,’ he tells him. ‘Don’t matter where you’re from.’ 

The newspaperman frowns, ‘We know where we’re from, mate.’

Big John shakes his head. 

He buys his own farm at last, cold hard cash. The dream. An expanse of wiry gums and thorny wattle. He builds a neat pine porch round the cottage and strings up a hammock in bleached linen. He rips silver shrubs clear from his patch, chases snakes past the fence. Sows veggies in the spring under earnest cobalt skies, has his nap at the same time each afternoon. Everything that Big John plants can be cut with scissors. 

Each night, he does his best to stir the tiny aromatic leaves into the sauce. Says grace before his dinner. What is bonded in blood and bread can’t be undone. He chooses the fattiest finocchiona, the crisp scent of fennel on his fingers. He pours more wine into his cup.

 

 

Christina Carè is an Italian-Australian writer living in London. Overly curious, she studied Architecture, Art History and Philosophy before finally leaning into her passion for fiction. She interviewed actors for Spotlight, turned data into compelling stories at Google, and has edited for the F-Word feminist collective. She is published in the City of Stories anthology 2022, was a Faber Academy scholarship winner 2020, a London Writers Awardee 2019, and has been mentored by author Kirsty Logan. She currently teaches on sustainable creativity for Spread the Word while working on her debut novel, represented by Kate Evans at Peters Fraser + Dunlop.