Category: Prizewinning

I. MICHAELMAS

C

(If I think of my grandparents now, after all this writing and reading and imagining and remembering, two couples are thrown into relief, their outlines like clay figures in the mud where so many others are failing to resist the ebb and flow of forgetting. Both couples are elderly and Vietnamese and live in an apartment outside Paris with their eldest daughter. Both couples have been together sixty years, through two wars, and many separations. Both speak to me in a mix of Vietnamese, French, and a smattering of English. But one couple speak to me of suffering, loss, exile, forgiveness and redemption, and the other couple do not. Instead they are always laughing, with each other and at me, pinching, touching, feeding me, looking at me, shaking their heads and chastising me, praising my plumpness and my height and my grades. This second couple is harder to write but easier to remember. I think of them as saying to me over and over again, We want you to be. And also, Why don’t you marry that poor girl? And, When are you taking the bar exam? And always, Eat up, Why aren’t you eating, Finished already? I’ve been trying for a long time to bring the two couples together in my mind, or at least to avoid having to choose between them. And just now, thinking of them, I remember the visit that my grandmother and I paid to my grandfather one late afternoon when he was on his deathbed. He was in a clean, beige room in a public hospital a train and a bus away from their daughter’s apartment. He patted the side of the bed for my grandmother to come sit by him, and I asked them once again about the story, expecting them to tell me the usual things. Instead they chose to sing, something they had never done before, and would never do again, an old jazz standard: I remember you… But even as I was fumbling to record them on my phone, they were already finishing, lapsing into wrinkled smiles, so that the recording I have is nothing but silence.)

D

This will be the last time that I will have begun again – the last, because I will have learnt to see what I failed to see at the beginning. I will have learnt to see that a muddy swamp can be called a fen, that not knowing where you’re going can be a virtue, and that walking is a kind of perfection. I will have learnt to see that the dilapidated rental we left behind in Footscray will always be the house where we first bathed our daughter, washing off the blood and muck with which she arrived, and I will have learnt that after Cambridge we will return to that house in Footscray after all, and that, in time, it will also be where we first bathe our son, washing off the blood and muck with which he arrives. I will have learnt that the robes we matriculated in at Cambridge, hired from the college’s graduate student association, were actually cheap polyester, that most of the books in the many libraries in which I will have sat have never and will never be read, and that the past is no more a home than any of the string of place names with which my family is entangled could be a home: Hung-Xa, Hanoi, Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City, Laon, Paris, Boissy, Cambridge, Footscray. I will have learnt that we walk, as Paul said, by faith and not by sight. I will have learnt to stop stopping – that is, to stop waiting while stopped. I will have learnt, instead, to wait while walking, to walk without expectation of arriving and yet still be ready to arrive at any moment. In the end I will have learnt – or remembered, if there’s any difference – how to live. Or, at least, I will have learnt what we receive from our ancestors and what we pass on to our children – what we give them, even as we wash away the blood and muck with which they arrived.

1

We are walking in the meadows halfway between Cambridge and Grantchester. To our left, the river Cam, narrow and deep, winds its way towards town. It’s a fine autumn day, six months after I’d nearly lost them both, and the scene is dreamily bucolic: a canoe or two travelling upriver, a birdwatcher with binoculars trained on some bird of prey – a windhover, probably – beating at the gentle currents with its great wings, a silver-haired walker in Hunters and country coat, all bathed in weak English sunshine. Edith is asleep in the carrier on my back, which is so well designed that I can forget for lengthy stretches that she is even there, as if it is just the two of us again – Lauren and me.

As we walk through the meadows in silence, I remember the crowd of doctors in scrubs that suddenly appeared in the delivery room, the way they stood around Edith’s body – though she wasn’t Edith yet – on the table in the corner as I dumbly held Lauren’s hand; I remember the machine they wheeled in, a big plastic tube on wheels, the way the doctors spoke with quiet authority as they put not-yet-Edith inside and began to wheel her away; I remember the way the last doctor stopped at the door and looked back at me as if to say, Aren’t you coming? I let go of Lauren’s hand and followed, still mute.

I don’t know how much of this she remembers. But maybe it’s not so important to remember everything. Maybe there are reasons to forget.

As we enter the village of Grantchester, past a herd of grazing cows who pay us no mind, Lauren asks me if I’ve settled on a topic for my thesis.

At the beginning of term, Simons, my international law professor, told the class that in lieu of sitting the exam we could choose to submit a thesis. He meant a dissertation, an essay. A medium-length piece of writing duly researched and footnoted. He meant a very minor contribution to scholarship – a reappraisal of the doctrine of state responsibility for internationally wrongful acts as it appeared in the American–Mexican Claims Commission, or tracing the evolution of free-flow-of-data clauses in bilateral trade agreements. These are the kind of topics, I say to Lauren, that might tip the balance in my favour for a pupillage at one of the London chambers, or a traineeship at one of the international arbitration firms.

And that’s what you want, says Lauren, somewhere between a statement and a question.

It’s what everyone here wants, I say. The other students, they’re all Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Canadians, Indians.

The best the Commonwealth has to offer.

Back to the imperial bosom for validation, says Lauren.

And a golden ticket to stay on in the City, I say. Or clerk for a judge in the Hague.

Just so long as you don’t return to whatever backwater you came from, right?

At a pub in Grantchester, as I eat my first ever Yorkshire pudding,

Lauren asks again about the thesis. I don’t respond right away, lost in a trailing thought about Wittgenstein – he’d completed this same walk many times to take tea with Bertrand Russell at the Orchard, a nearby tearoom. Beside us Edith sits in her high chair, squeezing a slice of
avocado into a pulp in her fist.

A thesis, I say, is also a theory, an idea. And I have one of those, even if it isn’t something that will get me a job:

Forgetting is complicity. Remembering is complicity. Making art is complicity. Living in the world, pursuing material gain, buying a house you can’t afford: complicity. Starting a family, putting down roots is complicity; migration, travel, too. Hope is complicity, but so is despair. Asking, What is to be done? is complicity. Not asking is complicity. Being a human rights lawyer is complicity. Loving my daughter.

I imagine I am already hearing Lauren’s response: Complicity in what? Complicit how? Why don’t you just say what you mean? And why can’t you say it without referencing someone else? But instead she says, Then what are we doing here?

Winner of the 2024 PM’s Literary Award and shortlisted for the 2024 Miles Franklin, Anam can be found here.

FOUR 

… 

Intery, mintery, cuttery, corn 

Apple bough and apple thorn 

Bramble, briar, limber lock 

Three geese fly in a flock 

Cranny key is held in hand forged in blood 

Open the door to fairyland. the sticklegrass wood 

Someone has annotated the rhyme in faded ink, crossing words out and scribbling in new ones. 

I know that writing. I’d know it anywhere. 

This is Mam’s. 

As I read the rhyme, a memory surfaces. Not of Mam, but of Odette, and the day I took her to Sicklehurst. 

I brought her here, to the secret door. I made a wreath to open it and chanted the nursery rhyme. She begged me to teach it to her, so I did. 

I look down at the crumbling sheet of paper in front of me. There’s mettle in nursery rhymes, power that grows stronger each time the charm is repeated, over and over, through the ages. Folk songs too, even pop songs, accumulate mettle if they get played and sung enough. 

The memory is already fading, but I’ve got instructions now. I read through the rhyme a few times until I’m sure of what I need. 

I can use the locket and feathers from Odette’s wreath, but other than that I’ll have to start again. 

A yellow rosebush grows by the little door, and I snap off a cane, careful to avoid getting pricked. I can’t find any mint, but there’s a clump of costmary nearby that will have to do. There’s a stunted apple tree in the thicket, its branches gnarled and low. I realise that, along with no bees nor flying things of any kind, there are no flowers here, by the wall of Sicklehurst. I snap off a flexible whip of new growth from the apple tree, then bend to collect a few stalks of devil’s snare. 

I take my ingredients back to the door and sit cross-legged on the grass. 

I have no magic left. But Odette had no magic either, and she did it. After all, the spell to open the little door has already been cast. The wreath is more like . . . a password, or a key. Odette saw me make the wreath, back when we were little. And she remembered. But how had I known? Had I watched someone make it as well? 

Mam. It must have been Mam. Had she left the paper moth for me to find? Did she want me to return to Sicklehurst? 

Go home, says sensible Maude. You’re being ridiculous. 

But this is where the paper moth led me. I’ve spun enough stories to know when the hero must heed the call. 

I can’t go home yet. 

I take the costmary, rose cane, apple and devil’s snare, and braid them together, then bend the braid into a circular wreath. I wrap Odette’s necklace around the bottom, and tuck the three feathers in. 

Blood. The scrap of linen in the locket has some, but it’s old. I slide the bone-pin brooch from my cardigan, and prick my thumb, squeezing a single drop to splash on the locket, vivid red against the dull silver. 

Then I replace the pin and Nan’s rose, stand up, and hang my fresh wreath on the horseshoe nail, over Odette’s withered one. I take a deep breath, feeling more than a little foolish. 

‘Intery, mintery, cuttery, corn 

Apple bough and apple thorn 

Bramble, briar, limber lock 

Three geese fly in a flock 

Cranny key is forged in blood 

Open the door to the sticklegrass wood.’ 

I repeat the charm three times, then turn around once and spit into a turkey rhubarb bush growing up against the wall. 

Nothing happens, but maybe the air feels a little cooler than before. The shadows are growing long as the sun begins to sink towards the horizon. 

I should go home. 

I don’t belong here. 

But I wait. 

The shrill song of a cicada explodes from a nearby stand of whisky grass, so loud that it makes my ears ache. 

I am hit with the overpowering scent of rose petals. It doesn’t smell soft and sweet, like Nan’s roses at home. This scent is rich and bloody, like roses strewn on a battlefield. It’s voluptuous, intoxicating, primal, like I’m being suffocated with petals. The sensual, earthy decay of them seeps into my skin, is sucked down my throat into my lungs, and infuses my blood. My whole body pulses with it. 

It feels like a warning. 

I stand up and reach out a hand to the dark wood of the door. It’s ice-cold and seems to throb under my touch, like it recognises me. Like it’s been waiting. My heart judders in response, the blood in my veins running suddenly cold, then hot, then cold again. 

I feel a heavy pull in my abdomen, as if I’m getting my period. 

The pinprick on my thumb pulses, and blood starts to weep from it. I press it to the door. 

I can feel the overlapping layers of the triple spell – the loose, floaty forgetting spell over Inglenook, and the heavy blanket over the walls. I can even sense the third layer, deep within Sicklehurst, as thick and impenetrable as lead. 

I should walk away. This isn’t me. This isn’t what I do. I like my adventures to be imaginary, where I’m able to step out at any moment and return to the comfort of home. 

Nan and Halmoni will be worried about me. 

But Odette could be in there. 

She needs me. 

Sicklehurst calls to me, to the wild girl I once was, the fierce creature that roamed Cygnet Creek with a pocketful of pebbles and dreams. 

‘Open,’ I whisper. 

I take a deep breath and focus my energy on the door, reaching with my witch-hands for the strands of mettle. But as always now, they slip away from me, like I’m a ghost. When it first happened, I thought it was just temporary. That I’d wake up one morning and be able to weave the mettle once more. Every morning, I’d reach out for it. And every morning, the mettle would slip through the fingers of my mind. Eventually, I stopped trying, because it hurt too much to fail. 

But Odette got in. I’m sure of it – her necklace is here. 

Which means I can get in too. 

‘Let. Me. In,’ I command. 

The leaves and blossoms on the wreath curl and shrivel in front of me, then crumble into dust that gets whipped away on a gust of wind. What’s left of the wreath slips to the ground. Only the feathers are undamaged. 

The musky scent of roses hits me again, thick and moist, like rotting vegetation. 

Thunder rumbles overhead. 

The door shifts under my hand, opening a crack, and my ears pop. 

A thorned rose cane spills out of the door, like some sea creature’s tentacle. I glimpse velvet-red petals, more than I could have imagined. There is malice in them. They tremble, as though they’re being ruffled by a breeze I can’t feel. I glimpse a shape beyond them, insubstantial as mist, whirling and writhing in wisps of silver and white. I watch as the silvery threads coalesce into a human figure. 

Despite his white hair, I don’t think he’s much older than me. He is stunningly beautiful – a long, graceful neck, sharp cheekbones and platinum eyes fringed with thick, silvered lashes. He stares at me, his lips parting in shock, and a crease appears between his brows. I have never seen anyone quite like him before, and yet he feels sharply familiar. He opens his mouth to speak, but no words come out, only a strange, inhuman cry. He reaches out a long, fine-boned hand, but the red roses close in, and he dissipates as if he were nothing more than a shadow. 

I push the door fully open. There are no roses. No beautiful ghost boy. The abandoned power plant is gloomy, veiled in evening shadow. I see the rising bulk of the cooling tower again, past crumbling buildings, silhouetted against the darkening sky. 

There’s a faint glow coming from the very top, as if a candle has been lit in a princess’s tower. Is that where Odette is? 

I look over my shoulder at the holly thicket, drab and colourless under a cold rising slice of egg moon. I imagine walking back along the dark paths – the slimy creek, the garbage-strewn public housing, pushing blindly through grasping branches. 

There’s no going back now. I step forward into Sicklehurst, through skin-crawling wrongness as I pass through the second layer of the triple spell, the door falling closed behind me with an ominous thunk. 

I should have brought a torch. There’s barely any light left in the day, and I’m an idiot for coming in here at all. I turn to leave, but the door is gone, replaced by unbroken red brick. 

Of course it is. Bloody magic doors. 

Everything looks . . . fairly ordinary. Nettles scramble over cracked concrete paths. Garden beds are overgrown with hemlock and wood-parsley. The structures are weathered – windows broken and grimy, paint flaking. It looks exactly how a forty-years’-abandoned power plant should look. 

But beneath my feet, I can sense something powerful, huge and spreading. It feels like . . . a kind of vast consciousness. It calls to me in whispers that I can’t understand, but I get the feeling that it recognises me, just as I recognise it. 

The mettle of it feels somehow oily – dull and grey instead of the usual bright silver. 

Something is wrong. 

There’s a building before me, a squat brick thing lined with broken windows. To one side is a series of storage sheds. To the other is bare earth, raised and chalky, next to a muddy-looking pond. I can see the frames of rusting tanks in the distance and, beyond, a huge barnlike container building. Behind everything is the rising concrete mass of the cooling tower. 

It’s hard to decide which way to go when you’re not really sure what you’re looking for. I had expected it to be made clear when I arrived. I’d thought Odette would be here, grimy and grateful to be found. Or I would be greeted by a wise old wizard or a talking animal, or perhaps have the path laid out before me in coloured brick. 

Maybe the secrets of Sicklehurst aren’t available to me. I’m no lost girl, no tragic princess. I’m not the hero of anyone’s story. My gift is telling stories, not living them. 

I feel a rising wave of shame, that familiar feeling of wrongness, like I don’t belong. Like I’m inappropriate. I clench my fists and swallow it down. 

Not today. 

My heart starts to beat faster as I realise there’s something moving around the corner of the squat brick building. I can see it, white like a ghost. Is it the boy again? I take a deep breath and head around the corner. I am surprised to discover that it is a clothesline, strung between two wooden poles, pegged out with white sheets. I walk right up to it, not quite believing that it’s real. Who is hanging laundry inside an abandoned power plant? 

A sudden gust of wind billows the sheets out towards me, and I’m engulfed by waves of bed linen. It smells like sunshine and dittany. I try to step backwards but become tangled in the sheets and turned around, so I’m not sure which way is forward and which way is back. The sheets boom and snap in the wind, whipping at my face and shoulders. I push through them, but there seems to be another row, then another, an endless maelstrom of crisp white cotton. 

And then I’m out, the sheets behind me. But when I look over my shoulder, there’s only a single clothesline, with two sheets hanging from it. I’m standing in front of a ramshackle wooden building, leaning visibly to one side, dittany bushes growing thick up against it. A faded sign over the door reads security office. Gauzy curtains float from the window. 

Is someone living here? 

I touch my fingers to the bone-pin brooch for luck. It feels warm. 

A girl steps out of the building, carrying an empty laundry basket on her hip. She’s about my age, perhaps a little older, wearing a blue-and-white polka-dot dress that hugs appealingly plump curves, her beetle-black hair swept up into a vintage roll. She looks familiar, but I can’t quite figure out why. Her lips are painted red, and freckles are sprayed across the pale bridge of her nose. She turns bright-blue eyes onto me, eyes that widen in surprise. 

‘This is unexpected,’ she says, her voice low and warm. ‘Are you lost?’ 

Winner of the Writing for Young Adults category in the 2024 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Hunger of Thorns, can be found here.