The Following Day
L.P. Tunis (Melbourne University, Australia)
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This road, that road
They are driving through the cool subtropical rainforest just south of Lismore; Susannah, twenty five and two months pregnant, shouldn’t have bothered coming all this way. After her, a little boy, a child, went on dressed as Charlie Chaplin. He sang, he mimed, he goose-stepped across stage with a straight finger under his nose—they even threw coins! They hardly noticed she was up there. She’s okay now though. Her and Michael had a good talk. Michael’s white hair rests lightly on his shoulders, on his grey cord coat. His palms are blistered from climbing a rope hanging from the oak tree. Hannah places her hand over his on the gear stick. He looks down and the road is wet and the car kicks to the side then straightens out. ‘Wow,’ he laughs and then it spins, and there’s time to think and act and the car smashes a fern, and skids and rolls down a bank, and the metal presses against her elbow and the car presses deep into the mud and she has time to see images from drink driving ads—Michael’s face and neck—then the car is still. There are leaves and branches on the windshield. The radio comes on.
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Grandma died yesterday
Grandma died yesterday. Susannah, ten, is carrying a big striped bag of Grandma’s clothes, smelling like a mass of Grandma, like her whole life. Susannah and her mum are taking the things home so they can clean them, sort them, and work out what on earth to do with them. Her mum is carrying a box of albums that they can go through over breakfast. It’s still early, peak hour, and Spencer Street Station is full of people in grey and black suits, or in slim skirts that make it hard to walk. Blue and grey metal trains the shape of knitting needles slide in and out of the station, but their train doesn’t seem to be coming. A confident voice calls out names of suburbs she’s already been to, where friends live, but he doesn’t call their suburb, he doesn’t say ‘Brighton’. A cold breeze pencils through the people waiting for their train, then the striped bag gushes open and Grandma’s clothes spill into the air and onto the tracks and onto people’s faces and everyone is smelling Grandma’s life. Two school girls in gloves, sisters a little older than Susannah, dash about hoarding the clothes against their stomachs. Susannah, still holding the sagging bag, now empty, is grabbed by the elbow and pulled onto the train by her mum. The bell goes and the train starts moving again—the school girls left on the platform with armfuls of dead Grandma’s satin blouses and heavy skirts.
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Something wonderful happened
But in retrospect Susannah was fatigued for quite another reason. On 8 June 1983—the news was six years in reaching her—an old primary school friend, long out of contact, suffered an anaphylactic shock from penicillin. The reaction burnt the girl ‘from the inside out’, very nearly killing her. Her extremities died and when she was brought out of the coma, the doctor had the task of explaining that she would live, but she would live herein with neither her left hand, nor her left leg from the thigh down. Articles appeared about her—‘Something Wonderful Happened’—and Susannah read about her old friend’s ‘astounding’ academic and personal successes. Deciding early, the girl said, that she was a survivor and not a victim, she completed a medical science honours degree and was, at that time, mid-way into a doctorate. Susannah found that resolve could come away like a piece of clothing, could die back like bacteria. Waking, showering, using a petrol pump, the simple, invisible things, went from being automatic and uncomplicated to being convoluted, awkward and wearing. The illness removed something, the suspension of disbelief. Susannah ought to feel cleansed, she reminded herself.
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L.P. Tunis is a writer and editor whose work has recently been published in Rex and Nth Degree: New Australian Writing. He has recently completed a Masters of Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing at the University of Melbourne.
