SUSANNAH THOMPSON
I have always had a keen interest in studying human behavior and exploring the various ways in which it can be described and understood. Even advertisements hold a particular interest to me.
Currently, I reside in the Camden area and continuing to be interested in its local history.
THE BAKE SHOP
Let me tell you, right at the out-set, that I do not know Amelia.
This is how I learned about her.
It is a hot clammy Friday afternoon around 2.30pm. I’m on a train heading home from the city. I have a seat in one of those carriage set aside for wheelchair occupants. At the moment there is only myself, and an Indian lady, and a man in a suit, sitting opposite me. There is a steady stream of traffic as teenage students pass from one carriage to another. They look sweaty, shirts sticking to their backs, and they are loud. Indian lady shrugs her shoulders at me, and we both smile.
We are about to find out what loud really means.
Two stops on, a portable ramp crashes with a whiplash crack at the carriage door. A huge woman in a wheelchair is propelled up it and swerved into the carriage. Including the boy, pushing the wheelchair, there are four children, young adults, ranging in age from about fourteen to eighteen years. The first thing I notice about the woman is her legs. Inflamed, extraordinarily swollen. It hurts to look at them. The woman’s feet are spilling over the straps of her sandals. The two boys and the youngest girl are yelling at each other. It’s escalating toward flash point. They all have phones in their hands. The eldest girl, legs wrapped round each other, is curved and folded into her phone. The movement of her fingers on the face of the phone is like a ballet, quick, precise, elegant. This girl, without looking up, says “Ma.”
Ma booms into the standoff between the three to cut it out or she will take their phones of them. They become quiet immediately. This silence lasts for the next two stops, but a sullen atmosphere prevails. The eldest boy erupts with venom when another line of school students attempts to use the carriage as a passageway.
“Watch it. There’s a woman in a wheelchair. There’s not enough room to get past. Show some respect.”
The students aren’t cowered by him. They slow down a little and carefully inch their way past the wheelchair. The eldest boy glares at them but Ma smiles at the extra care the students take. The train glides into another station and three police men get on. They are big men made much bigger with the paraphernalia bulging around their waistlines. They have guns. The red-haired policeman recognises the man in the suit and moves into the carriage to talk to him. The children, apart from the girl with the ballet fingers, consider this to be a token of friendliness for them as well.
“Is that a real gun?” asks one of them.
“Yes.” He grins indulgently. “But you can’t touch it”
That grin opens the flood gates, and he is peppered with questions. They are not touching the gun, but they are touching him and other parts of the belt.
“Look at all these things Lucy. Look” One of the children shakes her shoulder.
Lucy looks up from her phone, flicks a glance at the policeman’s face, and then at the gun. Her disdain is evident. Turns back to her phone. That glance took two seconds perhaps, but in those two seconds the policeman takes note of liquid amber eyes and is transfixed, oblivious to the fact that the children are pressing closer. The other policemen are alert to this, and the one with the hardest eyes and the thinnest lips moves in.
“Back off kids.” He is not threatening but his voice matches his face, and the children peel away immediately.
“I know you” says Ma. “We’ve met. You worked with my cousin at Wollongong station.”
The policeman does remember her. Some chit chat is exchanged. “This your brood. You’ve got your hands full here.” Ma shrugs. She has established her status. He addresses his red-headed colleague. “Next stop ours, mate.” The young policeman throws a backward glance at Lucy, but she is oblivious to it.
The eldest boy is aggrieved and upset.
“He didn’t remember me. He remembered you Ma. He didn’t remember me.”
“Why should he?” Ma asks genuinely surprised.
“Because he’s the first cop who ever charged me. No heart, the bastard. Even when I told him you were in a wheelchair.”
“That was his job.” Ma snaps at him. The thin sliver of status has slipped away. “You got what you deserved.”
The boy flinches, his face reddens. There are tears in his eyes. I feel for him. He is hurting. He, too, wants status. To be memorable. Lucy looks up and states “Amelia’s coming for lunch tomorrow.”
There is an explosion of joy. The eldest boy is now jumping up and down. The two youngest are punching their fists in the air. “What are we going to eat?” yells the youngest girl.
“Quieten down” commands Ma. “Let me think or there won’t be a lunch.”
Lucy’s preciseness matches the precision of her ballet fingers. “We’ll have chicken schnitzel, chips and mushy peas.” They all nod in agreement. Amelia loves the way Lucy makes the schnitzel, and if there a lot of chips they only have to have a small helping of the mushy peas. The desert presents a problem. There is vanilla ice-cream left in the freezer, but the budget won’t allow for anything extra this week. The youngest boy says importantly that if he weeds the garden for the next-door neighbours, he can pick lots of strawberries from their garden patch. He glows in the thumbs up sign all his family give him. The train is slowing down for the next station. There is the clang of the portable ramp, and the family departs. We hear the fading strains of “Amelia’s coming for lunch, Amelia’s coming for lunch.”
One of the passengers joining the carriage is a man wearing the vest of railway employee. He is on the phone, and we hear “Are they closing the station down?” Haven’t caught the guy yet?” “How many police.” He’s off the phone and becomes chatty. There’s been a stabbing at Campbelltown station. The Indian lady and I look at each other. We’ve weathered the washing machine of emotions. We are rolling with the punches.
Home. Showered. Crisp white wine in chilled glass. The television news announces the police have found the stabbed man and are investigating the incident. There is a glimpse of a man on a stretcher as the paramedics wheel him into an ambulance.
And the wish comes into my mind, that, as Amelia sits before her banquet of chicken schnitzel, chips and mushy peas followed by desert of vanilla ice-cream with the bartered strawberries, she brings to that table the kind of strength that will throw a protective mantle around the family. That the young boy, smarting with tears in his eyes, will never lie bloodied on a stretcher, aching with the desire to be of note. Pleading with whoever gets there first, that they will remember him.
Maybe it will become enough that Amelia keeps coming for lunch and that she remembers him.
Maybe. I hope so.
Susannah Thompson © 2024
SWARMS AND PINK BUBBLES
4th January 2011.
Dear Journal.
It has been a most unsettling Christmas and start to the New Year. You know my Christmases are unsettling at the best of times but 2010 was particularly trying. I blame it all on Bella. You know all about my cousin Bella, the one who went to Florence as Isobel, Issy that is, and came back blonder, slimmer with sashaying hips and lower necklines. She tells me she has discovered style. She tells me the Italian men insisted on calling her Bella because that means beautiful in Italian and that the Italian men told her she had radiant magnetism. I know my lips are tightening and disappearing. How wonderful, I say, but are you sure that’s what they were saying. After all, you don’t speak the language. Perhaps they were saying something quite different, like pass the butter or we’ll go halves over the dinner bill.
Bella knows this is a deliberate shot. Every year the family contributes to the cost of the Christmas lunch and in return I cook for vegans, vegetarians, and carnivores. Everybody paid up ages ago.
Not Bella.
In 2008, which became the Year of Truthfulness – you know that I had told Bella that she never repaid debts, that she couldn’t be depended upon and other things as well. You are also aware that I told a lot of other people a lot of other things as well and that this led directly to 2009 being the Year of Repentance. I suppose you could summarise 2010 as the Year of Bella and Thin Lips Disappearing. Anyway, right now Bella declines my request to cut up the onions for the turkey stuffing, gets up, saunters to the door, and says, in what she probably thinks is a languid manner,
“It’s sweet the way your hair frizzes in this humidity. By the way, I’m bringing Edwardo to Christmas lunch.”
“Italian men don’t like red hair.” She flicks this at me as she goes through the door. Looking back on it, it must have been the fish and the prawns that were off. At least the vegans didn’t get sick or the ones that stuck with turkey. It was a combination of two things. Bella had taken the seafood dishes out of the fridge in order to chill glasses for drinks – couldn’t be bothered to use the fridge in the garage. The second thing, Cousin Jane had turned off the air conditioning – so she could save the planet. As you know, I do the cooking and Cousin Jane contributes the big house. On the plus side, Bella, who gorged on the fish and prawns she hadn’t contributed to, was most definitely not radiating magnetism over the next few days. The problem was I had a bit of everything and so ended up feeling queasy as well. Still better than Bella though.
On Boxing Day, I opened her Christmas present to me. On the card she had written, Merry Christmas Poppy – Hope you enjoy the book (dear Journal, it still had the $5.00 Manager’s Markdown sticker on it) and I so much hope the Creative Visualization Meditations CD will inspire you in” the field of personal growth and consciousness.” The quote was directly from the CD cover.
A cup of tea, a book and then a snooze to soothing sounds and I won’t be unwell anymore. The five-dollar book and I bet the marked down CD turned out to be revelations. The book is called Prey by Michael Crichton, the fellow who wrote Jurassic Park. Amongst other titles is a book called Eaters of the Dead – yuk.
Prey basically deals with the consequences of an experiment gone horribly wrong. A company under pressure to fulfil a defence contract combines the fields of nanotechnology, biotechnology and computer technology to recklessly release self-replicating entities into the environment. The self-replicating entities present as swarms. They do not stay within the strictures of self-replication but evolve beyond their original programming, which is based on the swarm intelligence of predatory animals. In short, humans become the prey, the swarms are the predators. In order to survive, the swarms eat us and in the process can replicate our shape. I become unstuck on page 260 where Michael Crichton informs me I am in fact a giant swarm.
A swarm of swarms in fact. My blood, liver and kidneys are separate body swarms. I am not solid – I am a swirling mass of cells and atoms, which are clustered together in smaller swirls of cells and atoms. All that swarming and swirling is bringing back the queasy feeling. I slide my not solid self along the bed and put my not solid head on the firm, unmoving pillow. Will self tranquillise with comforting visualisations. I turn on the CD player.
Shakti Gawain, the visualisation guide, has a light voice and a soft American accent. She wants me to imagine there is a cord attached to my back which is making its way deep into the earth and the earth’s energy will then pass through this cord and into my spine and then throughout my body. This is the grounding exercise which will keep me firmly but lovingly tethered to the earth. Trouble is I start to feel myself being dragged under the ground while a river of sludge snakes its way through and into and over my swarms within swarms, into my mouth, my nose. Am fighting for breath. Shakti tells me to envision the energies of the universe are now entering through my head and creating another energy flow. I should now be pulsating deeply with energies from below and above. All this pulsation is causing my stomach to churn.
I fast forward to track two. Shakti tells me the universe is waiting to fulfil all my desires. What I do is envision what I want; put that in a pink bubble and then let it gently waft away. The universe will then see to it that my wish will come true. This is called manifesting. I concentrate on making a pink bubble and doze off. And dream. My swarms turn into demented antlike figures bent on manifesting revenge for bad fish and prawns. They blow thousands and thousands of pink bubbles which they burst with sharp little pincers. My stomach overfills with sticky sloshing liquid, and I feel the hot, sour sting of bile at the back of my throat. I wake up just as my stomach heaves and lurch to the bathroom with murderous thoughts toward Bella and Cousin Jane.
6th January
Bella’s birthday. I send her two books by Michael Crichton, Eaters of the Dead (hard to find) and Next which deals with the following questions – is a loved one missing body parts, are blondes becoming extinct and has a human already cross-bred with a monkey? I write on the card. Dear Bella, Happy Birthday. Don’t worry about the blondes becoming extinct – I’m sure he meant only the natural ones. (Just joking) Love Poppy
8th January
Edwardo rings. How am I? Wanted to ring before but heard I was ill. What have I been doing? I tell him about Prey. He’s fascinated. I tell him about trying meditation. He’s charmed. I am radiating magnetism without trying. Would I like to go to Florence and cook in his restaurant? I would be the Elizabeth Rossetti of his kitchen and his heart.
I know three things about Elizabeth Rossetti. She was a talented artist. She had fabulous red hair. And when she died, her broken-hearted husband secretly placed in her casket, the collection of poems he had prepared for publication. Six years later he had the coffin hauled up; the rotting notebook of poems was removed and down went Elizabeth again. So, I’m onto Edwardo, but. After all, Florence is Florence.
I ring Cousin Jane and have a long chat. Slip in that Edwardo is mad about my red hair. He is bowled over by my blend of scientific knowledge and spirituality. He has invited me to Florence.
I smirk when I put the phone down.
Everyone knows Cousin Jane always tells Bella everything.
Susannah Thompson © 2024
