A LIFE IN THREE PARTS: JUNETOWN

I.

Size Two Shoes

The town I live in was your town.

One you came to as an exile after your father died.

You were the youngest and your mother bought you

ballet shoes so you could dance around

on tippy toe in the backyard at Roma.

There was nothing sinister, nothing that would justify

a long, sad memoir.

No sensational tragedy, no secret past.

You just went to boarding school there,

never knowing as you sang Ave Maria to the nuns

in that virginal soprano,

that you would give birth to eleven babies in

this town.

A snobby, cliquey place,

full of intrigues and incomprehensible crimes.

Underneath the neat streets and pretty gardens,

something angry and wayward loitered -

as perhaps it always does.

In any town.

By sheer chance our War Service house,

ended up in the better part of town,

as the long dirt road up a hill close by became bitumen,

and the invisible markers of social class went up.

This accidental status was never reflected

in the family’s bank balance,

but you went to the movies and to coffee and to choir,

and to church,

in your pretty clothes and tasteful jewellery,

as if it was.

You were proud of your tiny feet,

‘Size two’, you would say,

holding them out to be admired.

When we emptied the house to sell it,

after you died,

we found a tiny black leather baby shoe

of mine, in a drawer.

You had kept it all those years,

proud that your baby girl had inherited

your small feet.

Now the shoe sits on a bookcase,

with a family tree of photos.

It seems symbolic;

of your pale and freckled feet,

and the elegant little shoes you wore.

Always busy.

Always going somewhere,

walking quickly.

Eager as a child, even into old age,

for what lay around the corner.

II.

Piano Playing

She’s the reason I can never hear a piano playing

without hearing it as if it was playing in the next room.

Near, near to me, close to my heart.

She’s what makes me feel, still,

a frisson of fear when I smell beer,

her fear of drunkenness as near to me as if it was my own.

Her thoughts tame mine.

I believe people can be too rich and too thin.

I believe the rich are to be despised and envied simultaneously,

and that to fail your children is to fail utterly.

Songs my mother taught me.

She loved me first and best.

This is the family romance: so they tell us.

Maybe.

Perhaps my mother made love too important,

But how could that be done?

And by whom?

The tinkling notes die away.

The heart and the mind tick over.

The tinkling notes of an old fashioned song

settle on the air.

Fatal, but not serious.

III

Birthday by the River Styx

Death is as natural as breathing,

but this is not natural,

my mother’s last birthday celebration.

She is dying of cancer,

worried by death,

as if a dog had her in its hairy jaws.

So thin and so frightened,

even under the opiates.

At night she can’t be alone.

The dark is death’s brother,

and she notices the resemblance.

But this winter’s day,

there is wine,

apple pie and cream, lasagne,

a birthday cake, bunches of roses.

All her children are there,

Ray Charles is on the CD player singing,

I Can’t Stop Loving you,

with that smoky catch in his voice.

And it’s true.

I can’t.

Antonia Hildebrand’s first published short story appeared in Downs Images and in ‘Woman’s Day‘ Summer Reading’ and she has since been widely published in journals, magazines and anthologies in Australia as well as Britain and the USA and Ireland. She has contributed to ABC Radio National’s Bush Telegraph program. Many of her short stories have been broadcast by Radio 91.3FM Yeppoon. She won the University of Southern Queensland Library Poetry Prize 1998 and the Fellowship of Australian Writer’s Marjorie Barnard Award in 1999 for her short story, ‘To Breathe’. She is the author of nine books, ranging from biography to autobiography, essays, poetry, short fiction through to novels. Her novel, ‘The Darkened Room’ was published by Ginninderra Press in 2022. Her next novel, ‘The Birthday Lunch’ is a work in progress. Her latest book is a poetry collection, ‘Broken Dolls’. She won ‘The Studio Prize’ for poetry in 2023.

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